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> Org-Mode Makes Sense Outside of Emacs ... goes on to name one tool (pandoc) that parses Org-Mode (and also parses Markdown. I would in fact guess pandoc is u

> Org-Mode Makes Sense Outside of Emacs ... goes on to name one tool (pandoc) that parses Org-Mode (and also parses Markdown. I would in fact guess pandoc is used much more often for the latter than the former). > Org-Mode Has Excellent Tool Support > this is not an article about Emacs ... goes on to describe the "tool support" in Emacs. Sorry, but the paragraph title here really implies we're going to be talking about a range of tools, not just Emacs. And then to conclude: > With this blog article I wanted to point out the usefulness of Org-mode even when you are not using Emacs as an writing tool. Can anyone point me to where exactly in the article the author has done this? Org-Mode is great if you use Emacs. Try installing the Org-Mode addon in your non-Emacs IDE of choice, and you'll hit the same "partially implemented/not-yet-supported/etc." issues you would using an obscure markdown parser. In this regard, Markdown is much more "standardised" than Org-Mode—a standard exists for both, but the level of adherance to that standard in terms of the total number of parsers out there is undoubtedly higher for Markdown.

bad_user 8y ago
I don't really like opinions such as yours, because you're nitpicky. This article actually doesn't give it justice, because Org-Mode is more than an alternative to Markdown because it specifies formatting for time-based tasks, so you can specify deadlines and you can also track the time you work on those tasks. You can use Org-Mode for task management in a way that other formats are not suitable. Examples of tooling: 1. GitHub can render Org-Mode files (in gists, etc) 2. you can find task management tools for iPhone / Android that can work with Org-Mode, one example being: https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/ 3. in a text editor all you really need is syntax highlighting, but yes, you can find plugins for many editors, not as evolved as Emacs's, but acceptable, e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=tootone.org-mode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=to... Speaking of apps like no. 2, show me TODO apps that synchronize text files to Dropbox, using your format of choice that's not Org-Mode. Is tooling really a reason for why you're not using Org-Mode, or is it because you're too conservative to try it?
- agentwiggles 8y ago
  Tooling is definitely at least part of why I don't use org, and I use emacs as my primary editor. I love the concept of org, but getting it synced and using it on mobile were not trivial, and features that I'd expect from any similar solution were all painfully manual. I wanted to love org, but I just haven't found a way to make it work for me, and tooling is certainly part of the problem.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different. The word standardization gets abused a lot in our industry. Usually it implies something that 1) has a non ambiguous specification, 2) is widely used. 3) is endorsed by some standards body or cross industry organization or simply so widely used that it effectively is a standard 4) has multiple independent implementations (tools, parsers, websiters, etc.) Org-mode has a specification (https://orgmode.org/); https://orgmode.org/); is at this point in time not widely used; has not been endorsed or proposed to a standards body like e.g. w3c, ietf, etc.; has a very limited amount of implementations. Declaring it a standard is meaningless until that is fixed. The Github flavor of markdown has a decent specification (https://github.github.com/gfm/ https://github.github.com/gfm/), many implementations of e.g. parsers for different languages, many websites/tools/etc. using it. It's not at this point a formal standard but the previous makes it more or less a de-facto industry standard that is widely used, with a reference OSS implementation and many other parsers aiming to be compatible. If you are implementing markdown support, you could do worse than pick this flavor. Several other flavors are equally well specified, have similarly good tool support and industry endorsement, and might very well be considered standards in their own right. Of course, like with Json, there's a long tail of not so great parsers that have implementation specific bugs/quirks/omissions/features, etc.
- thekaleb 8y ago
  I would point out this as the standard without GitHub extensions: https://commonmark.org https://commonmark.org
  - jillesvangurp 8y ago
    Github flavor spec specifies it is a strict superset of that. But you are right to mention this.
- dewitt 8y ago
  > Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different. Just a minor note on this: Org-mode was created in 2003 (the syntax a bit earlier) and Markdown in 2004, so I think this was a case of parallel evolution, each unaware of the other, not intentional deviation. Edit: And the use cases were different. Org was designed as a syntax for an outliner, and Markdown was designed as a syntax for prose. Both are plain text and optimized for readability in their pre-processed form, but maybe it's the fact that they are so similar that's remarkable.
nextos 8y ago
I think you have made several incorrect statements. I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more, because: * It supports a variety of timestamps, which is critical for implementing task management workflows. In fact, I think Org has more users for it's time management features than for anything else. * It supports tables with spreadsheet-like formulas. So you can include data in your documents and perform computations. This opens the door to accounting, billing and part lists when doing project management, etc. * It extends Emacs outline-mode, so it has a really consistent hierarchical structure, properties, tags and whatnot. Very important in a number of use cases. * It supports literate programming, which I don't use, but can reasonably replace Jupyter-like notebooks. * It defines a number of link types, which can be extended. Out of the box, it does support DOI for example. Which is important for many people doing reference management.
- jmull 8y ago
  > I think you have made several incorrect statements. If you're going to say that, you should list some of them (with corrections).
  - omaranto 8y ago
    Heck, even without corrections listing some would be way, way better than just claiming they exist.
- lucideer 8y ago
  > I think you have made several incorrect statements. If I did, I'd be eager to correct them. What were they? > I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more I agree. Org is great, as I said above. I don't think I criticise Org anywhere in my comment, I was purely questioning the points in the article about non-Emacs use.
  - nextos 8y ago
    Apologies for my imprecise answer before. I mainly intended to say I think Org is much more standardized than Markdown because there is at least a unique reference implementation and a unique reference document describing the format. Whereas for Markdown, you do have many slightly different implementations and attempts at standardization, despite Markdown being an order of magnitude simpler. In places like GitLab, people are taking advantage of this by running Emacs in batch mode inside a container to effectively use the reference implementation for export-to-other-formats purposes. It's not an ideal situation, though. And I hope someone creates a truly independent library. There is a Ruby parser employed by GitHub and GitLab which covers a decent subset of Org. Furthermore, Orgzly and vim-orgmode are pretty much closer to implementing a much bigger subset of Org.
bloopernova 8y ago
I actually started using orgmode completely outside of Emacs. The beginning workflow was VS Code, and I certainly appreciate your note about the partially implemented featureset of most orgmode non-Emacs clients. I then discovered Orgzly (http://www.orgzly.com/ http://www.orgzly.com/) which I hooked up to VS Code using Drop Box free. Orgzly is fantastic and supports a lot more of orgmode than most clients. (edited to add: orgzly is an android app) Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs running on either Windows 10 or OS X terminals. There's a decent cheat sheet (https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf) that I refer to a lot. So my advice would be to give orgmode a try using Orgzly at first, then get a simple instance of Emacs going and use the cheat sheet to make things easier to learn and dip into. I think the push to try to do things outside of Emacs is throwing away the orgmode original codebase baby with the Emacs bathwater. I know Emacs is considered scarier even than vim, but for my simple use case it works well. It was even fairly easy to get the org-jira plugin working to pull my Jira tickets into TODO items.
- lucideer 8y ago
  > Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs I've tried on VS Code and also given up (on Org, not on vscode, which was far more central to my workflow than Org was). I'd tried SyncOrg on Android, but had not heard of Orgzly. I see from your link it's on FDroid—just retried doing a search on FDroid for 'org-mode' to see what else is out there that I missed, and nothing comes up (neither SyncOrg not Orgzly). FDroid really need to fix their search, and/or makes of those clients really need to fix their metadata; not sure which. I may give Orgzly a go, but tbh without decent desktop client (short of switching to Emacs, which I shan't be doing), I'm not sure how worthwhile it will be. I may try some pandoc automation...
  - dmix 8y ago
    Is the F-Droid apk search different than their website? It returns Orgzly in results for both "org-mode" and "Orgzly": https://search.f-droid.org/?q=orgzly&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=orgzly&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=org-mode&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=org-mode&lang=en
schwartzworld 8y ago
> Org-Mode Makes Sense Outside of Emacs > Org-Mode Has Excellent Tool Support > this is not an article about Emacs I honestly believe that org-mode alone is reason enough to keep emacs installed on your system. It's full-featured enough that you could ignore everything else Emacs does and still find it a very powerful application. > the level of adherance to that standard in terms of the total number of parsers out there is undoubtedly higher for Markdown. Sure, there is less tooling because it is used less, but that's not an argument against embracing it. The more people who use it, the more parsers will get written for it.

bad_user 8y ago

I don't really like opinions such as yours, because you're nitpicky. This article actually doesn't give it justice, because Org-Mode is more than an alternative to Markdown because it specifies formatting for time-based tasks, so you can specify deadlines and you can also track the time you work on those tasks. You can use Org-Mode for task management in a way that other formats are not suitable. Examples of tooling: 1. GitHub can render Org-Mode files (in gists, etc) 2. you can find task management tools for iPhone / Android that can work with Org-Mode, one example being: https://beorgapp.com/ https://beorgapp.com/ 3. in a text editor all you really need is syntax highlighting, but yes, you can find plugins for many editors, not as evolved as Emacs's, but acceptable, e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=tootone.org-mode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=to... Speaking of apps like no. 2, show me TODO apps that synchronize text files to Dropbox, using your format of choice that's not Org-Mode. Is tooling really a reason for why you're not using Org-Mode, or is it because you're too conservative to try it?

agentwiggles 8y ago
Tooling is definitely at least part of why I don't use org, and I use emacs as my primary editor. I love the concept of org, but getting it synced and using it on mobile were not trivial, and features that I'd expect from any similar solution were all painfully manual. I wanted to love org, but I just haven't found a way to make it work for me, and tooling is certainly part of the problem.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different. The word standardization gets abused a lot in our industry. Usually it implies something that 1) has a non ambiguous specification, 2) is widely used. 3) is endorsed by some standards body or cross industry organization or simply so widely used that it effectively is a standard 4) has multiple independent implementations (tools, parsers, websiters, etc.) Org-mode has a specification (https://orgmode.org/); https://orgmode.org/); is at this point in time not widely used; has not been endorsed or proposed to a standards body like e.g. w3c, ietf, etc.; has a very limited amount of implementations. Declaring it a standard is meaningless until that is fixed. The Github flavor of markdown has a decent specification (https://github.github.com/gfm/ https://github.github.com/gfm/), many implementations of e.g. parsers for different languages, many websites/tools/etc. using it. It's not at this point a formal standard but the previous makes it more or less a de-facto industry standard that is widely used, with a reference OSS implementation and many other parsers aiming to be compatible. If you are implementing markdown support, you could do worse than pick this flavor. Several other flavors are equally well specified, have similarly good tool support and industry endorsement, and might very well be considered standards in their own right. Of course, like with Json, there's a long tail of not so great parsers that have implementation specific bugs/quirks/omissions/features, etc.

thekaleb 8y ago
I would point out this as the standard without GitHub extensions: https://commonmark.org https://commonmark.org
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  Github flavor spec specifies it is a strict superset of that. But you are right to mention this.
dewitt 8y ago
> Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different. Just a minor note on this: Org-mode was created in 2003 (the syntax a bit earlier) and Markdown in 2004, so I think this was a case of parallel evolution, each unaware of the other, not intentional deviation. Edit: And the use cases were different. Org was designed as a syntax for an outliner, and Markdown was designed as a syntax for prose. Both are plain text and optimized for readability in their pre-processed form, but maybe it's the fact that they are so similar that's remarkable.

nextos 8y ago

I think you have made several incorrect statements. I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more, because: * It supports a variety of timestamps, which is critical for implementing task management workflows. In fact, I think Org has more users for it's time management features than for anything else. * It supports tables with spreadsheet-like formulas. So you can include data in your documents and perform computations. This opens the door to accounting, billing and part lists when doing project management, etc. * It extends Emacs outline-mode, so it has a really consistent hierarchical structure, properties, tags and whatnot. Very important in a number of use cases. * It supports literate programming, which I don't use, but can reasonably replace Jupyter-like notebooks. * It defines a number of link types, which can be extended. Out of the box, it does support DOI for example. Which is important for many people doing reference management.

jmull 8y ago
> I think you have made several incorrect statements. If you're going to say that, you should list some of them (with corrections).
- omaranto 8y ago
  Heck, even without corrections listing some would be way, way better than just claiming they exist.
lucideer 8y ago
> I think you have made several incorrect statements. If I did, I'd be eager to correct them. What were they? > I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more I agree. Org is great, as I said above. I don't think I criticise Org anywhere in my comment, I was purely questioning the points in the article about non-Emacs use.
- nextos 8y ago
  Apologies for my imprecise answer before. I mainly intended to say I think Org is much more standardized than Markdown because there is at least a unique reference implementation and a unique reference document describing the format. Whereas for Markdown, you do have many slightly different implementations and attempts at standardization, despite Markdown being an order of magnitude simpler. In places like GitLab, people are taking advantage of this by running Emacs in batch mode inside a container to effectively use the reference implementation for export-to-other-formats purposes. It's not an ideal situation, though. And I hope someone creates a truly independent library. There is a Ruby parser employed by GitHub and GitLab which covers a decent subset of Org. Furthermore, Orgzly and vim-orgmode are pretty much closer to implementing a much bigger subset of Org.

bloopernova 8y ago

I actually started using orgmode completely outside of Emacs. The beginning workflow was VS Code, and I certainly appreciate your note about the partially implemented featureset of most orgmode non-Emacs clients. I then discovered Orgzly (http://www.orgzly.com/ http://www.orgzly.com/) which I hooked up to VS Code using Drop Box free. Orgzly is fantastic and supports a lot more of orgmode than most clients. (edited to add: orgzly is an android app) Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs running on either Windows 10 or OS X terminals. There's a decent cheat sheet (https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf) that I refer to a lot. So my advice would be to give orgmode a try using Orgzly at first, then get a simple instance of Emacs going and use the cheat sheet to make things easier to learn and dip into. I think the push to try to do things outside of Emacs is throwing away the orgmode original codebase baby with the Emacs bathwater. I know Emacs is considered scarier even than vim, but for my simple use case it works well. It was even fairly easy to get the org-jira plugin working to pull my Jira tickets into TODO items.

lucideer 8y ago
> Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs I've tried on VS Code and also given up (on Org, not on vscode, which was far more central to my workflow than Org was). I'd tried SyncOrg on Android, but had not heard of Orgzly. I see from your link it's on FDroid—just retried doing a search on FDroid for 'org-mode' to see what else is out there that I missed, and nothing comes up (neither SyncOrg not Orgzly). FDroid really need to fix their search, and/or makes of those clients really need to fix their metadata; not sure which. I may give Orgzly a go, but tbh without decent desktop client (short of switching to Emacs, which I shan't be doing), I'm not sure how worthwhile it will be. I may try some pandoc automation...
- dmix 8y ago
  Is the F-Droid apk search different than their website? It returns Orgzly in results for both "org-mode" and "Orgzly": https://search.f-droid.org/?q=orgzly&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=orgzly&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=org-mode&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=org-mode&lang=en

schwartzworld 8y ago

> Org-Mode Makes Sense Outside of Emacs > Org-Mode Has Excellent Tool Support > this is not an article about Emacs I honestly believe that org-mode alone is reason enough to keep emacs installed on your system. It's full-featured enough that you could ignore everything else Emacs does and still find it a very powerful application. > the level of adherance to that standard in terms of the total number of parsers out there is undoubtedly higher for Markdown. Sure, there is less tooling because it is used less, but that's not an argument against embracing it. The more people who use it, the more parsers will get written for it.