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Org is quite unique. I use it daily, and I would feel a bit less anxious if the language was standardized as this would facilitate alternative implementations o
by nextos 6y ago
Org is quite unique. I use it daily, and I would feel a bit less anxious if the language was standardized as this would facilitate alternative implementations outside Emacs. Right now, the implementation is the standard and that is a bit messy.
I don't know about any other language that combines a plain text outliner, keywords, tags, timestamps, hyperlinks and tables. These are exceptionally good primitives to implement a myriad of workflows. And I've left out some incredible features I do not use, like literate programming.
Applications like Things or OmniFocus are nice, but they can't adapt to alternative workflows. OmniOutliner was pretty great, though, and motivated some Org features during the GTD craze of late 2000s.
- tikhonj 6y agoI think what makes Org special—just like Emacs—is that it's a small system that can grow. You can customize it however you like, and it's easy to add functionality on top of (or into) the core system. In practice, would standardization hinder this property? It seems like the cost of evolving org-mode would become much higher if there were a formal standard and a number of actively used implementations—we'd have to worry about backwards compatibility, inconsistencies between systems... etc. As it happens, I absolutely would love better support for org-mode workflows in other systems, especially on mobile. (I use Orgzly on Android which is fine but also limited and inflexible.) I could also see a native org-mode implementation making core operations much faster, although the EmacsGCC work is making a real improvement on that front already. But I worry that supporting that would sacrifice the very properties that let org-mode evolve into what it is and to continue evolving even now.