10 ms·

Org-mode 9.4 is out. Can you help?

190 points by bzg 6y ago

iLemming 6y ago
I think it would be great if the development of Org has moved to Gitlab or GitHub, i.e. simplified the contribution process.
- ska 6y ago
  Did you make that comment to the list?
- bzg 6y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit more on how this would simplif the contribution process? Perhaps it would make it more familiar, but I don't think it would really simplify it. First because I think issue handling on GitLab/GitHub kinda worsen the problem of the lack of maintainance resources, instead of fixing it Second because we are quite strict on how to format changelog entries, and I believe email interactions help educating contributors in a nice way, while MR/PR interactions might generate more fatigue -- not so sure about this one, though.
  - iLemming 6y ago
    There was a long thread on the topic in the emacs-dev mailing list not too long ago that generated a heated discussion of over half-a-thousand messages (where most of it was around "the proper way of sending patches"). I'm not trying to start another flamewar. The basic notion is that the email threads model is focused around the subject line, and PR-model is specifically designed to have discussions where the code changes take the main stage. I'm sure if you ask Jonas Bernoulli, Steve Purcell, Oleh Krehel, Bozhidar Batsov, and many other prominent Emacs hackers, they'd probably agree, without PR-model, it would be a lot harder for them to find so many contributors for great Emacs packages they authored and maintain. To be honest, it feels a bit ironic when the shepherds of Free Software (GNU hackers, et al.) choose to ignore the people's free will, and in 2020 it is clear - people have made their choice. They don't want to deal with email threads, patches, etc. The majority of developers prefer to be able to issue Pull-Requests instead. But there's something else, there's now an entire generation of software developers who simply don't know how to deal with sending patches, etc., and they don't even care. And that's not a good trend. The issue of patches vs. pull-requests has become generational. And if the old software projects fail to adapt, I'm afraid they'd slowly start dying.
    - bzg 6y ago
      "But there's something else, there's now an entire generation of software developers who simply don't know how to deal with sending patches, etc., and they don't even care. And that's not a good trend." Agreed. I hope https://sr.ht https://sr.ht can help resisting this trend. I'm sure there are plenty of happy Git(Lab/Hub) users here but again, I'm not convinced these platforms would fit Org's needs.
      - shaunxcode 6y ago
        Interesting, I did not expect to find fennel there!
      - tikej 6y ago
        I'm a beginner in elisp (and tbh in programming in general) but would like to help. For me pull request model is much more natural than mailing lists and patches. It doesn't matter at all if its GitHub, GitLab or (my personal preference as it's lightweight, open source and easy to use) Gitea (interestingly it's not present in comparison on https://forgeperf.org https://forgeperf.org). I don't even know how to make PR on sourcehut and can't find any tutorial. Of course I will try to learn in order to help org but the entry barrier is much higher than for Git(Lab/Hub/ea). EDIT: I just found orgmode code on Gogs here: https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode That's great! I'll register and try to help soon! Mabye it should be more visible and linked in docs (I'll... make a PR I suppose? :)
        moonchild 6y ago
        You can still do pull requests over email. Rather than attaching a patch, you simply send a link to your git repository (+branch if applicable), and the maintainer can pull from it.
        bzg 6y ago
        We don't use code.orgmode.org for Org's development. But please clone Org's repo, make a patch - perhaps with https://magit.vc https://magit.vc - and attach it to an email you send to emacs-orgmode@gnu.org: that's all it takes. Then we will help with polishing your contribution :)
  - eslaught 6y ago
    It looks like your bug tracker is a bunch of pointers into a mailing list. This means: (a) you have no ability to edit entries (or do anything else that email is bad at), (b) the mail interface is frankly hard to read, with everything in uniform monospace font and no formatting, (c) I can't participate or reply on the web interface, I have to sign up for something completely different to participate., and (d) because of the way the site is laid out, I can't see how to get the code, etc. from the bug tracker. I would presumably go back to Google and search for org mode and then try to figure it out from there. But that's just a lot more steps to do what could be made easy. Now, I'm not necessarily super crazy about Github and the like. But for these issues, in my opinion they do a pretty reasonable job. I don't personally think that Github makes PR formatting any harder; I would expect any contributors to use a git command line to look at what they put in the commit message. But at any rate, that's some user education you'll have to do one way or the other. With the current approach, you've got a bunch of other barriers to entry that prevent you from seeing certain users in the first place.
    - bzg 6y ago
      "I can't participate or reply on the web interface, I have to sign up for something completely different to participate" Let me correct this one: no, you don't have to sign up to anything: (1) click on a bug entry on https://updates.orgmode.org https://updates.orgmode.org then (2) click on "try the mailto: link" link. This is other way around: if Org goes to GitLab, GitHub-only users will have to sign up to GitLab just to report an issue, and same for GitHub.
      - iLemming 6y ago
        It's not about specific platform. It's about accepting PRs instead of patches.
        bzg 6y ago
        I hope one day both worlds will reconcile. After all, it should be possible to have PRs sent as patches over a mailing list (and we don't need manual patches to be published as PRs.)
  - throwaway-org 6y ago
    Other than the issues others have raised about mailing list vs. PRs from Git{Hub,Lab}, here is the information you need to send to the FSF in order to contribute >15LOC: - [Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes? Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.] - [Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own your changes? Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?] - [For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?] - [What year were you born?] - [Please write your email address here.] - [Please write your postal address here.] I have several bugfixes and enhancements to various org-babel languages that I maintain for my local code, but I have no interest in jumping through copyright assignment hoops or sharing my age & mailing address to push them upstream.
    - iLemming 6y ago
      Yeah, that's pretty stupid. Writing free and open-source code is not a privilege. It's a community service. Imagine if you decided to pick up some trash in your local park, and cops would stop you from doing that and ask you first to submit an official form, mail it to the city hall, wait for a few days for it to be reviewed and approved...
      - hyperion2010 6y ago
        If you have never contributed to a properly managed GPL codebase, you might be surprised the kinds of things you will be asked to do. More it the point, it most certainly isn't a right that you can contribute however you want to whatever project you want. Projects have constraints. Some people can _never_ contribute to Emacs because of the other code bases they work on (e.g. Chez Scheme). If you happen to be one of the folks who can, then in a sense, it is a privilege that reflects your freedom from other constraints.
        iLemming 6y ago
        "Some people can _never_ contribute"... the emphasis is around "some". Going back to my hypothetical example of doing community service, sure some people should not be allowed to do that. Let's say there's a person with a criminal record for throwing garbage at people, or someone who is too old or disabled for that kind of work. But it is still quite enormously stupid to create tremendous bureaucratic obstacles for everyone, for the sake of protecting a few individuals or against the potential damage they may cause.
  - whelming_wave 6y ago
    I can't speak for others, but I'm driven away from contributing to projects that use mailing lists because there's a high barrier to entry, and here's a source of other people having the same issue[1] to corroborate my anecdote a little. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
    - cat199 6y ago
      as discussed in previous threads, the person promoting this claim within the linux foundation is also a microsoft employee, and microsoft owns github. so while it might represent some trend, it is also worthwhile to possibly consider editorial/selection bias as a factor for promoting the claim that this is significantly prohibitive
      - iLemming 6y ago
        Yes, MSFT acquiring GitHub was like if the Pope, supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church has announced that they are taking control over CERN and promised it would remain an independent research organization. What choice would all the scientists have in that case? They can't just say: "I'm leaving physics until someone else builds another LHC". Until we have a better, more superior, free, open-source, public service that can do things better than GitHub, I'm afraid we'd have to play along. But the point is not about GitHub vs. something else. It is about that Pull-Requests are preferred over mailing lists for open-source projects.
        tikej 6y ago
        We do. Gitlab or Gitea are FOSS (the first one partially, the other fully I think).
        bzg 6y ago
        And https://sr.ht https://sr.ht.
        Woodi 6y ago
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    Hi bzg, I'm an ex-org-mode contributor (we've worked together in the past!) and I do strongly agree that hosting development on GitHub or GitLab encourages people and reduces friction and is what all (yes) open source projects should do. I still write emacs-lisp packages for MELPA, but I absolutely hate the way that development of packages that have been folded into emacs is hidden behind opaque mailing-list based procedures, and apparently with little code review. Another concrete example is eglot: it is developed in the open on GitHub, which is great. But it is closely related to two other emacs packages: flymake and eldoc, which are developed via emacs-devel, or something, I've never really understood. So when changes need to be made in those packages it suddenly becomes very opaque, and I am not at all sure how much code review goes on. (This is not at all a criticism of João Távora who maintains all three I think! It is more structural and related to Emacs development in general.) It dissuades me from contributing to emacs in general. There is nothing advantageous about reviewing code by mailing list when we have GitHub and GitLab. For those of us who use GitHub and GitLab in our day jobs for code review and collaboration, it is really baffling and frustrating. Furthermore, although the org-mode mailing list is, I am sure, just as pleasant as it always way, lists like emacs-devel are incredibly toxic and depressing to read; a bunch of men arguing just like they did over IRC in the 80s and 90s. And good god, don't ever go near the #emacs IRC channel if you're not someone of that gender from that generation! I am sorry to say it but the emacs community has an atmosphere problem: it is common for people to be unpleasant in public. For example, the magit maintainer responded rudely, aggressively, and discouragingly to recent PRs against magit. Stallman's absurd one- or two- sentence replies. This is of course not Org-mode's fault; but I believe the future of Emacs development is to embrace GitHub / GitLab like other open source projects and leave the crusty 90s-era practices behind.
    - bzg 6y ago
      Hi! Thanks for your feedback. I think the Org mailing list has a pretty good record of both useful and polite conversations. I don't know if the tone of conversations is different on mailing lists vs. web UIs like issues, PRs or code reviews. As I said in another reply, I guess we can somehow reconcile both worlds by allowing PRs to be sent as patches to a mailing list - I guess https://sr.ht https://sr.ht could support something like this (if it does not already). The thing with the whole "entry barrier" point of people who want Org-mode development to happen on Git(Lab|Hub) is that they miss the point: I don't want more contributions, I want more engaged contributors, more committed support of any kind. I find emails to be more engaging than emojis on a web interface - and I use both on a daily basis, so perhaps I don't deserve my #okboomer yet :)
  - Abhinav2000 6y ago
    Off topic - but thank you so much for org mode!
    - bzg 6y ago
      Thanks! Also, this release is the work of... 94 contributors, I should have mentioned this in my post.
  - happy-dude 6y ago
    I wish Bram Moolenar could chime in on how hosting vim on GitHub has accelerated or promoted development for the editor. From what I understand, Bram's vim development workflow is very similar to other emac's dev: submitting and discussing patches via the mailing list. There was something (a bot?) setup such that PRs are forwarded to the mailing list: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md This was discussed pretty extensively when vim moved from Google Code to GitHub: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/Io5A_Zir--k/m/faPCHWYfvyAJ https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/Io5A_Zir--k/m/faPCHWYf... In general, PR/patches-friction should not be an obstacle for contributions because it can be alleviated in part by tooling that glues the workflows more-or-less seamlessly. EDIT: It might be worth asking how the neovim community in general may have been helped by the decision to make github their home, or maybe even ask the emacs-lsp devs on their gitter: https://gitter.im/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://gitter.im/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode ? EDIT 2: In the vim-dev mailing list, there are threads started from GitHub pull requests that include .patch and .diff files: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/7VpUqzoQycY/m/W_7zhTGfAwAJ https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/7VpUqzoQycY/m/W_7zhTGf...
  - tikhonj 6y ago
    In my experience, moving to GitHub probably is a downgrade from a more sophisticated process in terms of functionality—but it somehow lowers the barrier to entry enough for new people to contribute noticeably more. I'm sure there's some interesting psychology there but I don't know enough to theorize; all I can do is relay my observations. I don't know if there's some way to "partially" move to GitHub—it would be cool if there were some service that synced GitHub issues with a different tracker, for example, but I've never seen that. Perhaps it would become too noisy. Of course, more contributions might not be a net gain. For each dedicated contributor, you'll also get drive-by PRs and issues that add noise which maintainers have to deal with. I do not know how that trade-off plays out in practice. So I can't give a definite conclusion about whether GitHub is worth it, but I would be willing to bet that working on GitHub would get you more contributors.
SomaticPirate 6y ago
The Emacs news the past few days has been disheartening. I was genuinely considering learning org-mode and giving another go at using Emacs as my primary editor. Now I'm worried if it still makes sense to do that. Clearly a lot of people still find Emacs useful but the ecosystem seems too hard to break into. I'm still curious why Emacs hasn't obtained the same level of excitement as other editors like Vim and VS Code.
- bzg 6y ago
  I confirm it still makes sense. I just want to make things easier for the futur Org maintainer by spending the next few months recruiting more contributors.
- hpoe 6y ago
  If you have been using Vim go ahead and try doom emacs. I tried breaking into emacs before and dismissed it two times because it was too weird. But when I tried doom which is designed to use Vim keybindings and be easy for vim users to take up I found it super easy and have been loving how powerful it is. I have also heard good things about Spacemacs but I haven't tried it yet. It is a bit of a learning curve at first, but after three months I am starting to surpass my productivity on vim + bash + tmux and that's not bad considering I'd spent something like 5+ years in the previous environment.
  - ecspike 6y ago
    I was an originalist on Emacs and totally agree. I tried Spacemacs and then doom and got to throw away 80% of the customizations I'd acquired over the years. The only thing that pushed me from Spacemacs, which is a nice distro, to doom was Spacemacs instability. I needed some things from the beta channel and it lived up to its name.
- kstrauser 6y ago
  What news did you see that was disheartening? The only story I was was that helm is being put to pasture, but that's very separate from Emacs itself. I think Emacs has missed some of the excitement of, say, VSCode because until recently it hasn't had many opinionated guides to using it (like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs). I've overheard a lot of conversations like: New user: OK, got it installed! Now what should I do? Emacser: Anything you want! New user: I want to write Python. What's a good way to do that? Emacser: Here's 47 similarly named but substantially different Python modes. Choose the one you like! New user: Which one do you like? Emacser: I started with one I found in a GitHub gist, then modified it to do remote editing over a 3270 terminal. You should check it out! New user: ... There's a lot to be said for the VSCode approach of "here's the golden path to doing ${thing}. Once you've learned it, you might try the alternatives to see if some are a better fit for you." Alternatively, consider the analogy of a Linux distro that gives you a well configured KDE or Gnome environment, but that lets you switch to another DE once you've been using it for a while. Now Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are providing that experience to new users, and I've heard more excitement about Emacs in the last couple of years than in the previous decade.
hpoe 6y ago
Just want to throw out there I switched to emacs about 3 months ago after being a long time vimmer, one of the first things I was told was to check out org-mode as it was one of the greatest features of emacs. I heartily agree, after about a month I now do all my document authoring, PDF, LaTex, HTML, personal wiki notes, all of it goes in .org files. It was low barrier to productivity, and not much more effort to turn org mode into a powerful idea and through organizer as well as documentation. Beyond that I can author in org mode and then export to tex, to pdf, to html, to markdown to whatever I want using org mode. If you are a long time vimmer do yourself a favor make the next tech you learn be org-mode in doom-emacs. It is insanely powerful and I will never go back.
- tomerbd 6y ago
  Can you copy and paste an image into org mode? In many of my document/notes I find that I to copy and paste images into my documents like I take a screenshot and then paste..
  - hpoe 6y ago
    No, org mode is text based; however what you can do is link to an image, and then when you publish the org mode file as html, or pdf or whatever it will get interpolate and appear as though it had been pasted in. At least that has been my experience a more seasoned orger can correct my ignorance if I do err.
    - ycombinete 6y ago
      Org mode supports inline images. See more here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27129338/inline-images-in-org-mode#27129648 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27129338/inline-images-i...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - proxygeek 6y ago
    If you use it on Windows and have Itfanview installed, here's is how you can do it to copy paste images from clipboard using C-c-s (defun my-org-screenshot () "Take a screenshot into a time stamped unique-named file in the same directory as the org-buffer and insert a link to this file." (interactive) (setq screenshot_dir ".\\images\\") (setq tilde-buffer-filename (replace-regexp-in-string "/" "\\" (buffer-name) t t)) (setq filename (concat (make-temp-name (concat screenshot_dir tilde-buffer-filename ;; attempt to make irfanview approach work "_" (format-time-string "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S_")) ) ".png")) (insert (concat "[[file:" filename "]]")) (org-display-inline-images)) (global-set-key "\C-cs" 'my-org-screenshot)
tomerbd 6y ago
org mode for vim would be great
- juandazapata 6y ago
  Magit for vim would be great
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    I'm not a vimmer but I was under the impression that both of them were ported
    - skosch 6y ago
      I don't know about vimagit, but vim's org-mode support is very barebones. Give doom-emacs a try though. You really can have the best of both worlds nowadays.
- zzamboni 6y ago
  Both Doom Emacs and Spacemacs (maybe others) default to vim keybindings. I don't use it, but from what I have read, the emulation is almost perfect, and you get all the Emacs features (including Org) as part of the deal.
- iLemming 6y ago
  Vim has Org-mode, but it is very "shallow", compared to Emacs one. What makes Org-mode (and Emacs in general) so great is Lisp. I believe it is Lisp that allowed some crazy text manipulations and other tricks that would be significantly more difficult to build and maintain in another environment, using a different (non-lispy) language. I love Vim (as an idea) and I embraced Lisp (as an idea). I learned that Emacs could do everything that Vim does and even more and better. And just like I can't even type anymore without using vi-bindings, I can't imagine my life without Emacs. Emacs has all the facilities to (re)use and implement nice ideas. The other way around is not always easily possible. You cannot cook shrimp pasta if you don't have any shrimp, it's going to be just regular pasta. The secret ingredient of Org, Magit and many other great Emacs packages is Lisp. And there's no Lisp environment better than Emacs.
dctoedt 6y ago
It appears that the OP, @bzg, is Bastien Guerry, the current maintainer of org-mode — Bravo Zulu, Bastien! (By a happy coincidence, "Bravo Zulu" or just "BZ" is a U.S. Navy expression for "well done," defined in the publication ATP-1. [0].) [0] https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu
- bzg 6y ago
  I did not know for the "BZ" expression! I like it. Glad to find long-time power users here btw :)
- sn41 6y ago
  Does bzflag have something to do with this term?
  - dctoedt 6y ago
    > Does bzflag have something to do with this term? Not so far as I know.
    - officemonkey 6y ago
      BZflag, the tank game, is named after "Battle Zone", the original Atari tank game.
      - dctoedt 6y ago
        Ah - I have fond memories of that one, played on a machine that took quarters IIRC!
Sodaware 6y ago
It's not an exaggeration to say that org-mode changed my life. I started using it after my first year as a freelancer; I was really struggling to get myself organized and was prepping myself to get out of software entirely. Switching to org-mode helped me keep on top of everything in a way I'd never really experienced before. Since then I've expanded my usage of org considerably - I use it for taking notes, tracking my diet+exercise, and planning out my projects (more info here: https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-org/ https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-org/). It's not everybody's cup of tea, but for me it fits my mental models better than anything I've ever used.
- sasaf5 6y ago
  Are you me? :) I use a very similar org table to calculate my nutrition, only with separate columns for macronutrients. I don't have an update function like yours, though. | -1 | req. | 100 | 100 | 50 | | 3 | milk | 2.92| 4.37| 3.5| | # | |-91.2|-86.8|-39.5| #+TBLFM: @>$3..$5=(@<$1..@>>$1)*(@<..@>>)
grassy 6y ago
I just wanted to come here to say that I started learning emacs in the beginning of the pandemic. I'm going to start my first year of masters and I'm going full on emacs. Literally one of my big wants in life is to help free software.. I still have a lot of learning to do to get to a point where I can actually contribute, but I hope one day I can indeed help
- bzg 6y ago
  Where there is a will, there is a way. Don't hesitate to join Org's mailing list and lurk there for a while, you'll learn enough to contribute soon.
danShumway 6y ago
Org-mode is the reason I started using Emacs in the first place. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more important tool in my productivity/organization toolbelt, it's become a really important part of my notetaking process. It's not perfect by any means (exporting to other formats in particular is kind of messy), but it's an insanely powerful platform that does a ton of stuff, and is just really flexible without being too overwhelming. At the end of the day, everything is just text, so you can get in really deep with scheduling and capture templates, or you can just write out nice TODO lists. Also check out Orgzly on Android if you're looking for a mobile client. Works pretty well with a Syncthing setup, or you can host your notes on a platform like Dropbox if you think that's easier.
- sasaf5 6y ago
  For an Android client I just run it directly in a terminal emulator (Termux). Works well enough with the software keyboard (but a bluetooth keyboard brings real glory).
Erlangen 6y ago
I hope more project maintainers would call for help if it's needed. I am using org mode everyday, but I don't know org needs more contributors. That being said, I am definitely willing to help occasionally. Thanks for bring the message out, bzg.
djhworld 6y ago
I’ve recently started to get back into emacs and org, via doom emacs. Will see how it goes. How are people handling getting org files on multiple devices, with sync support etc. Dropbox?
- pgronkievitz 6y ago
  I'm using synchronization via Nextcloud. It's nice, because of webdav, but Dropbox is as nice as this, because Orgzly supports both of them
lootsauce 6y ago
I'm a UI developer, never used Org-Mode, not a VIM or Emacs user. But I am very interested in document creation, note taking, organizing workflows. Please forgive the lack of background in this question but... Can someone explain to me why if org-mode is so popular it is not used in places other than emacs or why is it bound to emacs? Is there some ux quality or set of features that are bound up in the unique key-bindings of Emacs or the scripting integration for example? Could any of this goodness make it's way to more accessible (for your average user) venues such as a basic GUI note taking app?
- tetris11 6y ago
  See orgzly for Android, and there are some web implementations too.
- trobertson 6y ago
  Org mode is great because it does 2 things extremely well: 1. Document structure. Folding, tree structures, linking, etc. are done very well in org-mode. But that's not unique to org-mode, several other solutions do that well. 2. org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your document - restricted to sections. This is amazing, as it basically gives you an entire application layer in your text documents. Where by entire layer, I mean having your calendar, email, programming environments, etc. all within your notes. org-mode used this way is not merely a document editor. It is the best plain-text workflow enabler the world has ever seen. And you can't do this outside of Emacs without essentially rewriting Emacs. Emacs _is_ the strength that org-mode leverages. org-mode is a unification of the many and varied Emacs major modes into a simple plain-text environment. And the best part is, you only need to use the particular modes you want. Your org-mode experience is tailored around your use case. You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just works.
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    > org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your document - restricted to sections. > You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just works. I haven't used org in a non-superficial way for a while. What are you referring to here, src blocks?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wsdookadr 6y ago
This was predictable. A software package shouldn't be in continous evolution. Org didn't really follow GNU philosophy. That's what commercial software like Microsoft Office does. They keep changing it without adding any value. Org should've been the opposite, future-proof, solid and robust. I'm not sure what the situation with the tests accompanying Org is, but in order to build future-proof software, tests are mandatory, comprehensive documentation is also very important. There's another element which I haven't really seen with Org, a clear idea of when and where to stop. As previously mentioned, the development phase of software should always have an end, in sight. The cases where software is developed for 2+ decades is very rare. This is mainly related to requirements and to the goal of the software, and I think this is something that wasn't done for Org. It's unclear where Org ends. It's interesting that Org could never have evolved out of some committee super-formal development environment (with tons of managers, SCRUM masters, architecture boards, etc), but at the same time it is an expertiment out of control. It's very dense and rich in ideas, but also in chaos (I guess we can't really have the former without the latter). Still I think the parts that distinguish Org from all other dynamic document formats, and from all other markup formats is that.. it's the most advanced, it was there before asciidoc or reStructuredText. Org is a pioneer in many ways.

190 points by bzg 6y ago

I think it would be great if the development of Org has moved to Gitlab or GitHub, i.e. simplified the contribution process.

ska 6y ago
Did you make that comment to the list?
bzg 6y ago
Can you elaborate a bit more on how this would simplif the contribution process? Perhaps it would make it more familiar, but I don't think it would really simplify it. First because I think issue handling on GitLab/GitHub kinda worsen the problem of the lack of maintainance resources, instead of fixing it Second because we are quite strict on how to format changelog entries, and I believe email interactions help educating contributors in a nice way, while MR/PR interactions might generate more fatigue -- not so sure about this one, though.
- iLemming 6y ago
  There was a long thread on the topic in the emacs-dev mailing list not too long ago that generated a heated discussion of over half-a-thousand messages (where most of it was around "the proper way of sending patches"). I'm not trying to start another flamewar. The basic notion is that the email threads model is focused around the subject line, and PR-model is specifically designed to have discussions where the code changes take the main stage. I'm sure if you ask Jonas Bernoulli, Steve Purcell, Oleh Krehel, Bozhidar Batsov, and many other prominent Emacs hackers, they'd probably agree, without PR-model, it would be a lot harder for them to find so many contributors for great Emacs packages they authored and maintain. To be honest, it feels a bit ironic when the shepherds of Free Software (GNU hackers, et al.) choose to ignore the people's free will, and in 2020 it is clear - people have made their choice. They don't want to deal with email threads, patches, etc. The majority of developers prefer to be able to issue Pull-Requests instead. But there's something else, there's now an entire generation of software developers who simply don't know how to deal with sending patches, etc., and they don't even care. And that's not a good trend. The issue of patches vs. pull-requests has become generational. And if the old software projects fail to adapt, I'm afraid they'd slowly start dying.
  - bzg 6y ago
    "But there's something else, there's now an entire generation of software developers who simply don't know how to deal with sending patches, etc., and they don't even care. And that's not a good trend." Agreed. I hope https://sr.ht https://sr.ht can help resisting this trend. I'm sure there are plenty of happy Git(Lab/Hub) users here but again, I'm not convinced these platforms would fit Org's needs.
    - shaunxcode 6y ago
      Interesting, I did not expect to find fennel there!
    - tikej 6y ago
      I'm a beginner in elisp (and tbh in programming in general) but would like to help. For me pull request model is much more natural than mailing lists and patches. It doesn't matter at all if its GitHub, GitLab or (my personal preference as it's lightweight, open source and easy to use) Gitea (interestingly it's not present in comparison on https://forgeperf.org https://forgeperf.org). I don't even know how to make PR on sourcehut and can't find any tutorial. Of course I will try to learn in order to help org but the entry barrier is much higher than for Git(Lab/Hub/ea). EDIT: I just found orgmode code on Gogs here: https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode https://code.orgmode.org/bzg/org-mode That's great! I'll register and try to help soon! Mabye it should be more visible and linked in docs (I'll... make a PR I suppose? :)
      - moonchild 6y ago
        You can still do pull requests over email. Rather than attaching a patch, you simply send a link to your git repository (+branch if applicable), and the maintainer can pull from it.
      - bzg 6y ago
        We don't use code.orgmode.org for Org's development. But please clone Org's repo, make a patch - perhaps with https://magit.vc https://magit.vc - and attach it to an email you send to emacs-orgmode@gnu.org: that's all it takes. Then we will help with polishing your contribution :)
- eslaught 6y ago
  It looks like your bug tracker is a bunch of pointers into a mailing list. This means: (a) you have no ability to edit entries (or do anything else that email is bad at), (b) the mail interface is frankly hard to read, with everything in uniform monospace font and no formatting, (c) I can't participate or reply on the web interface, I have to sign up for something completely different to participate., and (d) because of the way the site is laid out, I can't see how to get the code, etc. from the bug tracker. I would presumably go back to Google and search for org mode and then try to figure it out from there. But that's just a lot more steps to do what could be made easy. Now, I'm not necessarily super crazy about Github and the like. But for these issues, in my opinion they do a pretty reasonable job. I don't personally think that Github makes PR formatting any harder; I would expect any contributors to use a git command line to look at what they put in the commit message. But at any rate, that's some user education you'll have to do one way or the other. With the current approach, you've got a bunch of other barriers to entry that prevent you from seeing certain users in the first place.
  - bzg 6y ago
    "I can't participate or reply on the web interface, I have to sign up for something completely different to participate" Let me correct this one: no, you don't have to sign up to anything: (1) click on a bug entry on https://updates.orgmode.org https://updates.orgmode.org then (2) click on "try the mailto: link" link. This is other way around: if Org goes to GitLab, GitHub-only users will have to sign up to GitLab just to report an issue, and same for GitHub.
    - iLemming 6y ago
      It's not about specific platform. It's about accepting PRs instead of patches.
      - bzg 6y ago
        I hope one day both worlds will reconcile. After all, it should be possible to have PRs sent as patches over a mailing list (and we don't need manual patches to be published as PRs.)
- throwaway-org 6y ago
  Other than the issues others have raised about mailing list vs. PRs from Git{Hub,Lab}, here is the information you need to send to the FSF in order to contribute >15LOC: - [Did you copy any files or text written by someone else in these changes? Even if that material is free software, we need to know about it.] - [Do you have an employer who might have a basis to claim to own your changes? Do you attend a school which might make such a claim?] - [For the copyright registration, what country are you a citizen of?] - [What year were you born?] - [Please write your email address here.] - [Please write your postal address here.] I have several bugfixes and enhancements to various org-babel languages that I maintain for my local code, but I have no interest in jumping through copyright assignment hoops or sharing my age & mailing address to push them upstream.
  - iLemming 6y ago
    Yeah, that's pretty stupid. Writing free and open-source code is not a privilege. It's a community service. Imagine if you decided to pick up some trash in your local park, and cops would stop you from doing that and ask you first to submit an official form, mail it to the city hall, wait for a few days for it to be reviewed and approved...
    - hyperion2010 6y ago
      If you have never contributed to a properly managed GPL codebase, you might be surprised the kinds of things you will be asked to do. More it the point, it most certainly isn't a right that you can contribute however you want to whatever project you want. Projects have constraints. Some people can _never_ contribute to Emacs because of the other code bases they work on (e.g. Chez Scheme). If you happen to be one of the folks who can, then in a sense, it is a privilege that reflects your freedom from other constraints.
      - iLemming 6y ago
        "Some people can _never_ contribute"... the emphasis is around "some". Going back to my hypothetical example of doing community service, sure some people should not be allowed to do that. Let's say there's a person with a criminal record for throwing garbage at people, or someone who is too old or disabled for that kind of work. But it is still quite enormously stupid to create tremendous bureaucratic obstacles for everyone, for the sake of protecting a few individuals or against the potential damage they may cause.
- whelming_wave 6y ago
  I can't speak for others, but I'm driven away from contributing to projects that use mailing lists because there's a high barrier to entry, and here's a source of other people having the same issue[1] to corroborate my anecdote a little. [1]: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
  - cat199 6y ago
    as discussed in previous threads, the person promoting this claim within the linux foundation is also a microsoft employee, and microsoft owns github. so while it might represent some trend, it is also worthwhile to possibly consider editorial/selection bias as a factor for promoting the claim that this is significantly prohibitive
    - iLemming 6y ago
      Yes, MSFT acquiring GitHub was like if the Pope, supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church has announced that they are taking control over CERN and promised it would remain an independent research organization. What choice would all the scientists have in that case? They can't just say: "I'm leaving physics until someone else builds another LHC". Until we have a better, more superior, free, open-source, public service that can do things better than GitHub, I'm afraid we'd have to play along. But the point is not about GitHub vs. something else. It is about that Pull-Requests are preferred over mailing lists for open-source projects.
      - tikej 6y ago
        We do. Gitlab or Gitea are FOSS (the first one partially, the other fully I think).
        bzg 6y ago
        And https://sr.ht https://sr.ht.
      - Woodi 6y ago
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  Hi bzg, I'm an ex-org-mode contributor (we've worked together in the past!) and I do strongly agree that hosting development on GitHub or GitLab encourages people and reduces friction and is what all (yes) open source projects should do. I still write emacs-lisp packages for MELPA, but I absolutely hate the way that development of packages that have been folded into emacs is hidden behind opaque mailing-list based procedures, and apparently with little code review. Another concrete example is eglot: it is developed in the open on GitHub, which is great. But it is closely related to two other emacs packages: flymake and eldoc, which are developed via emacs-devel, or something, I've never really understood. So when changes need to be made in those packages it suddenly becomes very opaque, and I am not at all sure how much code review goes on. (This is not at all a criticism of João Távora who maintains all three I think! It is more structural and related to Emacs development in general.) It dissuades me from contributing to emacs in general. There is nothing advantageous about reviewing code by mailing list when we have GitHub and GitLab. For those of us who use GitHub and GitLab in our day jobs for code review and collaboration, it is really baffling and frustrating. Furthermore, although the org-mode mailing list is, I am sure, just as pleasant as it always way, lists like emacs-devel are incredibly toxic and depressing to read; a bunch of men arguing just like they did over IRC in the 80s and 90s. And good god, don't ever go near the #emacs IRC channel if you're not someone of that gender from that generation! I am sorry to say it but the emacs community has an atmosphere problem: it is common for people to be unpleasant in public. For example, the magit maintainer responded rudely, aggressively, and discouragingly to recent PRs against magit. Stallman's absurd one- or two- sentence replies. This is of course not Org-mode's fault; but I believe the future of Emacs development is to embrace GitHub / GitLab like other open source projects and leave the crusty 90s-era practices behind.
  - bzg 6y ago
    Hi! Thanks for your feedback. I think the Org mailing list has a pretty good record of both useful and polite conversations. I don't know if the tone of conversations is different on mailing lists vs. web UIs like issues, PRs or code reviews. As I said in another reply, I guess we can somehow reconcile both worlds by allowing PRs to be sent as patches to a mailing list - I guess https://sr.ht https://sr.ht could support something like this (if it does not already). The thing with the whole "entry barrier" point of people who want Org-mode development to happen on Git(Lab|Hub) is that they miss the point: I don't want more contributions, I want more engaged contributors, more committed support of any kind. I find emails to be more engaging than emojis on a web interface - and I use both on a daily basis, so perhaps I don't deserve my #okboomer yet :)
- Abhinav2000 6y ago
  Off topic - but thank you so much for org mode!
  - bzg 6y ago
    Thanks! Also, this release is the work of... 94 contributors, I should have mentioned this in my post.
- happy-dude 6y ago
  I wish Bram Moolenar could chime in on how hosting vim on GitHub has accelerated or promoted development for the editor. From what I understand, Bram's vim development workflow is very similar to other emac's dev: submitting and discussing patches via the mailing list. There was something (a bot?) setup such that PRs are forwarded to the mailing list: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md This was discussed pretty extensively when vim moved from Google Code to GitHub: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/Io5A_Zir--k/m/faPCHWYfvyAJ https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/Io5A_Zir--k/m/faPCHWYf... In general, PR/patches-friction should not be an obstacle for contributions because it can be alleviated in part by tooling that glues the workflows more-or-less seamlessly. EDIT: It might be worth asking how the neovim community in general may have been helped by the decision to make github their home, or maybe even ask the emacs-lsp devs on their gitter: https://gitter.im/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode https://gitter.im/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode ? EDIT 2: In the vim-dev mailing list, there are threads started from GitHub pull requests that include .patch and .diff files: https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/7VpUqzoQycY/m/W_7zhTGfAwAJ https://groups.google.com/g/vim_dev/c/7VpUqzoQycY/m/W_7zhTGf...
- tikhonj 6y ago
  In my experience, moving to GitHub probably is a downgrade from a more sophisticated process in terms of functionality—but it somehow lowers the barrier to entry enough for new people to contribute noticeably more. I'm sure there's some interesting psychology there but I don't know enough to theorize; all I can do is relay my observations. I don't know if there's some way to "partially" move to GitHub—it would be cool if there were some service that synced GitHub issues with a different tracker, for example, but I've never seen that. Perhaps it would become too noisy. Of course, more contributions might not be a net gain. For each dedicated contributor, you'll also get drive-by PRs and issues that add noise which maintainers have to deal with. I do not know how that trade-off plays out in practice. So I can't give a definite conclusion about whether GitHub is worth it, but I would be willing to bet that working on GitHub would get you more contributors.

SomaticPirate 6y ago

The Emacs news the past few days has been disheartening. I was genuinely considering learning org-mode and giving another go at using Emacs as my primary editor. Now I'm worried if it still makes sense to do that. Clearly a lot of people still find Emacs useful but the ecosystem seems too hard to break into. I'm still curious why Emacs hasn't obtained the same level of excitement as other editors like Vim and VS Code.

bzg 6y ago
I confirm it still makes sense. I just want to make things easier for the futur Org maintainer by spending the next few months recruiting more contributors.
hpoe 6y ago
If you have been using Vim go ahead and try doom emacs. I tried breaking into emacs before and dismissed it two times because it was too weird. But when I tried doom which is designed to use Vim keybindings and be easy for vim users to take up I found it super easy and have been loving how powerful it is. I have also heard good things about Spacemacs but I haven't tried it yet. It is a bit of a learning curve at first, but after three months I am starting to surpass my productivity on vim + bash + tmux and that's not bad considering I'd spent something like 5+ years in the previous environment.
- ecspike 6y ago
  I was an originalist on Emacs and totally agree. I tried Spacemacs and then doom and got to throw away 80% of the customizations I'd acquired over the years. The only thing that pushed me from Spacemacs, which is a nice distro, to doom was Spacemacs instability. I needed some things from the beta channel and it lived up to its name.
kstrauser 6y ago
What news did you see that was disheartening? The only story I was was that helm is being put to pasture, but that's very separate from Emacs itself. I think Emacs has missed some of the excitement of, say, VSCode because until recently it hasn't had many opinionated guides to using it (like Spacemacs or Doom Emacs). I've overheard a lot of conversations like: New user: OK, got it installed! Now what should I do? Emacser: Anything you want! New user: I want to write Python. What's a good way to do that? Emacser: Here's 47 similarly named but substantially different Python modes. Choose the one you like! New user: Which one do you like? Emacser: I started with one I found in a GitHub gist, then modified it to do remote editing over a 3270 terminal. You should check it out! New user: ... There's a lot to be said for the VSCode approach of "here's the golden path to doing ${thing}. Once you've learned it, you might try the alternatives to see if some are a better fit for you." Alternatively, consider the analogy of a Linux distro that gives you a well configured KDE or Gnome environment, but that lets you switch to another DE once you've been using it for a while. Now Spacemacs and Doom Emacs are providing that experience to new users, and I've heard more excitement about Emacs in the last couple of years than in the previous decade.

hpoe 6y ago

Just want to throw out there I switched to emacs about 3 months ago after being a long time vimmer, one of the first things I was told was to check out org-mode as it was one of the greatest features of emacs. I heartily agree, after about a month I now do all my document authoring, PDF, LaTex, HTML, personal wiki notes, all of it goes in .org files. It was low barrier to productivity, and not much more effort to turn org mode into a powerful idea and through organizer as well as documentation. Beyond that I can author in org mode and then export to tex, to pdf, to html, to markdown to whatever I want using org mode. If you are a long time vimmer do yourself a favor make the next tech you learn be org-mode in doom-emacs. It is insanely powerful and I will never go back.

tomerbd 6y ago
Can you copy and paste an image into org mode? In many of my document/notes I find that I to copy and paste images into my documents like I take a screenshot and then paste..
- hpoe 6y ago
  No, org mode is text based; however what you can do is link to an image, and then when you publish the org mode file as html, or pdf or whatever it will get interpolate and appear as though it had been pasted in. At least that has been my experience a more seasoned orger can correct my ignorance if I do err.
  - ycombinete 6y ago
    Org mode supports inline images. See more here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27129338/inline-images-in-org-mode#27129648 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27129338/inline-images-i...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- proxygeek 6y ago
  If you use it on Windows and have Itfanview installed, here's is how you can do it to copy paste images from clipboard using C-c-s (defun my-org-screenshot () "Take a screenshot into a time stamped unique-named file in the same directory as the org-buffer and insert a link to this file." (interactive) (setq screenshot_dir ".\\images\\") (setq tilde-buffer-filename (replace-regexp-in-string "/" "\\" (buffer-name) t t)) (setq filename (concat (make-temp-name (concat screenshot_dir tilde-buffer-filename ;; attempt to make irfanview approach work "_" (format-time-string "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S_")) ) ".png")) (insert (concat "[[file:" filename "]]")) (org-display-inline-images)) (global-set-key "\C-cs" 'my-org-screenshot)

tomerbd 6y ago

org mode for vim would be great

juandazapata 6y ago
Magit for vim would be great
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I'm not a vimmer but I was under the impression that both of them were ported
  - skosch 6y ago
    I don't know about vimagit, but vim's org-mode support is very barebones. Give doom-emacs a try though. You really can have the best of both worlds nowadays.
zzamboni 6y ago
Both Doom Emacs and Spacemacs (maybe others) default to vim keybindings. I don't use it, but from what I have read, the emulation is almost perfect, and you get all the Emacs features (including Org) as part of the deal.
iLemming 6y ago
Vim has Org-mode, but it is very "shallow", compared to Emacs one. What makes Org-mode (and Emacs in general) so great is Lisp. I believe it is Lisp that allowed some crazy text manipulations and other tricks that would be significantly more difficult to build and maintain in another environment, using a different (non-lispy) language. I love Vim (as an idea) and I embraced Lisp (as an idea). I learned that Emacs could do everything that Vim does and even more and better. And just like I can't even type anymore without using vi-bindings, I can't imagine my life without Emacs. Emacs has all the facilities to (re)use and implement nice ideas. The other way around is not always easily possible. You cannot cook shrimp pasta if you don't have any shrimp, it's going to be just regular pasta. The secret ingredient of Org, Magit and many other great Emacs packages is Lisp. And there's no Lisp environment better than Emacs.

dctoedt 6y ago

It appears that the OP, @bzg, is Bastien Guerry, the current maintainer of org-mode — Bravo Zulu, Bastien! (By a happy coincidence, "Bravo Zulu" or just "BZ" is a U.S. Navy expression for "well done," defined in the publication ATP-1. [0].) [0] https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu

bzg 6y ago
I did not know for the "BZ" expression! I like it. Glad to find long-time power users here btw :)
sn41 6y ago
Does bzflag have something to do with this term?
- dctoedt 6y ago
  > Does bzflag have something to do with this term? Not so far as I know.
  - officemonkey 6y ago
    BZflag, the tank game, is named after "Battle Zone", the original Atari tank game.
    - dctoedt 6y ago
      Ah - I have fond memories of that one, played on a machine that took quarters IIRC!

Sodaware 6y ago

It's not an exaggeration to say that org-mode changed my life. I started using it after my first year as a freelancer; I was really struggling to get myself organized and was prepping myself to get out of software entirely. Switching to org-mode helped me keep on top of everything in a way I'd never really experienced before. Since then I've expanded my usage of org considerably - I use it for taking notes, tracking my diet+exercise, and planning out my projects (more info here: https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-org/ https://www.philnewton.net/blog/emacs-org/). It's not everybody's cup of tea, but for me it fits my mental models better than anything I've ever used.

sasaf5 6y ago
Are you me? :) I use a very similar org table to calculate my nutrition, only with separate columns for macronutrients. I don't have an update function like yours, though. | -1 | req. | 100 | 100 | 50 | | 3 | milk | 2.92| 4.37| 3.5| | # | |-91.2|-86.8|-39.5| #+TBLFM: @>$3..$5=(@<$1..@>>$1)*(@<..@>>)

grassy 6y ago

I just wanted to come here to say that I started learning emacs in the beginning of the pandemic. I'm going to start my first year of masters and I'm going full on emacs. Literally one of my big wants in life is to help free software.. I still have a lot of learning to do to get to a point where I can actually contribute, but I hope one day I can indeed help

bzg 6y ago
Where there is a will, there is a way. Don't hesitate to join Org's mailing list and lurk there for a while, you'll learn enough to contribute soon.

danShumway 6y ago

Org-mode is the reason I started using Emacs in the first place. I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more important tool in my productivity/organization toolbelt, it's become a really important part of my notetaking process. It's not perfect by any means (exporting to other formats in particular is kind of messy), but it's an insanely powerful platform that does a ton of stuff, and is just really flexible without being too overwhelming. At the end of the day, everything is just text, so you can get in really deep with scheduling and capture templates, or you can just write out nice TODO lists. Also check out Orgzly on Android if you're looking for a mobile client. Works pretty well with a Syncthing setup, or you can host your notes on a platform like Dropbox if you think that's easier.

sasaf5 6y ago
For an Android client I just run it directly in a terminal emulator (Termux). Works well enough with the software keyboard (but a bluetooth keyboard brings real glory).

Erlangen 6y ago

I hope more project maintainers would call for help if it's needed. I am using org mode everyday, but I don't know org needs more contributors. That being said, I am definitely willing to help occasionally. Thanks for bring the message out, bzg.

djhworld 6y ago

I’ve recently started to get back into emacs and org, via doom emacs. Will see how it goes. How are people handling getting org files on multiple devices, with sync support etc. Dropbox?

pgronkievitz 6y ago
I'm using synchronization via Nextcloud. It's nice, because of webdav, but Dropbox is as nice as this, because Orgzly supports both of them

lootsauce 6y ago

I'm a UI developer, never used Org-Mode, not a VIM or Emacs user. But I am very interested in document creation, note taking, organizing workflows. Please forgive the lack of background in this question but... Can someone explain to me why if org-mode is so popular it is not used in places other than emacs or why is it bound to emacs? Is there some ux quality or set of features that are bound up in the unique key-bindings of Emacs or the scripting integration for example? Could any of this goodness make it's way to more accessible (for your average user) venues such as a basic GUI note taking app?

tetris11 6y ago
See orgzly for Android, and there are some web implementations too.
trobertson 6y ago
Org mode is great because it does 2 things extremely well: 1. Document structure. Folding, tree structures, linking, etc. are done very well in org-mode. But that's not unique to org-mode, several other solutions do that well. 2. org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your document - restricted to sections. This is amazing, as it basically gives you an entire application layer in your text documents. Where by entire layer, I mean having your calendar, email, programming environments, etc. all within your notes. org-mode used this way is not merely a document editor. It is the best plain-text workflow enabler the world has ever seen. And you can't do this outside of Emacs without essentially rewriting Emacs. Emacs _is_ the strength that org-mode leverages. org-mode is a unification of the many and varied Emacs major modes into a simple plain-text environment. And the best part is, you only need to use the particular modes you want. Your org-mode experience is tailored around your use case. You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just works.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  > org-mode lets you use all of the other Emacs major and minor modes in your document - restricted to sections. > You bring in the mode you want in that section and you're done. It just works. I haven't used org in a non-superficial way for a while. What are you referring to here, src blocks?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wsdookadr 6y ago

This was predictable. A software package shouldn't be in continous evolution. Org didn't really follow GNU philosophy. That's what commercial software like Microsoft Office does. They keep changing it without adding any value. Org should've been the opposite, future-proof, solid and robust. I'm not sure what the situation with the tests accompanying Org is, but in order to build future-proof software, tests are mandatory, comprehensive documentation is also very important. There's another element which I haven't really seen with Org, a clear idea of when and where to stop. As previously mentioned, the development phase of software should always have an end, in sight. The cases where software is developed for 2+ decades is very rare. This is mainly related to requirements and to the goal of the software, and I think this is something that wasn't done for Org. It's unclear where Org ends. It's interesting that Org could never have evolved out of some committee super-formal development environment (with tons of managers, SCRUM masters, architecture boards, etc), but at the same time it is an expertiment out of control. It's very dense and rich in ideas, but also in chaos (I guess we can't really have the former without the latter). Still I think the parts that distinguish Org from all other dynamic document formats, and from all other markup formats is that.. it's the most advanced, it was there before asciidoc or reStructuredText. Org is a pioneer in many ways.