9 ms·

Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)

287 points by adityaathalye 9mo ago

throw__away7391 9mo ago
We do not need another competing standard here. Markdown is adequate and more importantly widely adopted and growing.
- cenamus 9mo ago
  org-mode's first release was in 2003, Markdown apparently in 2004. So not just "yet another standard" And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown? It's more like having python notebooks right in there (any language really).
  - rgoulter 9mo ago
    > And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown I think the neatest part of org-babel is the source code block execution, & the various ways it supports for configuring output. This allows for org files to be "plaintext notebooks" (like jupyter in plaintext"). -- It's really surprising that this part is not more common. More niche is the "babel" part of that: because the code blocks can take variables as inputs, and output values, this allows a polyglot notebook where values from e.g. Python get passed to R and plotted or so. -- Cute idea, although I've never found it too useful. The supported types are (unsurprisingly) limited, and the language support for code blocks is held together by duct tape. (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?) Of course, org also has a long tail of neat features (like how each heading can have properties attached to it, as well as tags, and the task management that relates to this).
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      > It's really surprising that this part is not more common. I think it is because of low Emacs adoption and other editors not having enough support. The problem with polyglot notebook workflow is probably, that you can only use it well for small data, or at least not big data, because who wants to have a million lines of output suddenly appear in the buffer, only to then read them as input for the next language ... That would be a tremendous amount of computational overhead. And if we didn't have that, we would need a way to pass a proper value from one language to the other. What I also like is, that you can define code blocks that are used as formulas for spreadsheets (tables) inside the document. That's quite powerful too. > (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?) I don't find it very awful to use. I have used that for working through computer programming books and it was fabulous.
    - fipar 9mo ago
      I agree about the duct tape, which I also use often around the house, so maybe that's why I like org-babel :) Just wanted to say that I share data between different blocks in different languages through files and env variables (I add :session shared to the src blocks that need to access this). That is useful also to have src blocks you can execute repeatedly and that depend on something like an aws identity being assumed (you just assume it in the first block that shares the session). I agree it's messy, it's just a mess that works for me.
      - alexisread 9mo ago
        I think this is the crux of the issue, use like this is like a real program, just built up incrementally in a notebook rather than a repl or shell-with-pipes, and with manual error handling. The STEPS project was all about this- a way of incrementally building blocks that can be composed. With org mode in mind, ideally you would have language support for this ie. Comments are scoped metadata that can be formatted, tested, linked etc. You need a well defined spec like djot as a DSL for this to work, so that parsers can be easily written for it. This level of language support allows many different views onto the source code. We’re not there yet.
  - least 9mo ago
    Babel features are kind of a moot point if you’re just talking about the syntax, which seems to be the purpose of the post. Most of the reason to use org mode is tied to emacs. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something similar with markdown code blocks if someone were so inclined. But that’s tool dependent, not syntax. I sort of agree with Karl’s point about there being too many standards of markdown, but I doubt org mode would have survived the same level of popularity without suffering the same fate. It doesn’t help that there is no standard for org mode. You can only really use and take advantage of its power in emacs. It isn’t susceptible to lossy transformations because there’s only one real org mode editor.
    - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
      Well, but I am not aware of anyone having come up with a good syntax to do babel things in Markdown. Markdown and Org Mode also set out to serve different purposes. For a quick and dirty text Markdown might suffice, but the babel stuff and spreadsheet stuff enable a lot of use cases that Markdown simply doesn't cater to. We already have the implementation of all these nice things in Emacs. If we were to replicate them for some markdown dialect, they would probably be done half-right, before someone actually manages to get literate programming right for various languages, including what code to translate to, how to wrap or not wrap the code that is inside blocks, sessions, output formats, etc. We might as well use what we have with Emacs. There is probably a way to call Emacs' functionality from outside of Emacs, to treat it as a library. But not all is well with Org Mode syntax either. Many git hosters have only a very rudimentary implementation of a parser and writing a parser for it is not actually that easy. Its dynamic nature requires at least a 2 step approach of parsing and then later checking all kinds of definitions at the top of a file and further processing the document according to that. It's power comes at that cost. That's probably why we have so many Markdowns, but only one Org Mode (OK maybe a few, counting Vim and VSCodium plugins, that achieve a feature subset). I will say though, that org mode syntax is much better suited for writing technical documentation than markdown. The only issue is, that not so many people know it or want to learn it, and I don't know a way to change that. Perhaps that effort to have the org mode syntax separately defined (https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Overview.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Over...) by the same author will help creating more support for the format in various tools.
  - throw__away7391 9mo ago
    A) I'm aware and B) so what? Markdown is popular enough now that even people who aren't very technical and don't know that they're reading/writing Markdown are familiar with it. This is incredibly valuable and not something you can replicate through purely technical means, there are so many places where having a ubiquitous way to express in plain text is helpful. Markdown has grown into this role at the same time that the environment developed. You will not be able to recreate this situation.
- binary132 9mo ago
  I don’t think anyone who gets really familiar with org can ever honestly say with a straight face that Markdown is adequate in comparison.
  - drob518 9mo ago
    “Adequate” is a very relative term. Adequate for what? The fact that Markdown is widely used quite successfully demonstrates that it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks. Yes, Org mode might cover more of the long tail, but Markdown clearly covers all the important cases to the point that it has achieved wide adoption.
    - iLemming 9mo ago
      > it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks Is it though? Like for example, I often deal with Org-mode documents of several thousand lines of text and I honestly don't know any piece of software that can acceptably handle multi-thousand lines of markdown. Emacs/Org-mode has tons of different ways to navigate and search through these large bodies - the outline nature of the structure is perfect for that - there's narrowing, collapsing/expanding, sparse-tree search, flexible sorting, indirect buffers, imenu, overlays and text properties that can render the text conditionally, etc. I read HN and Reddit threads in Org-mode format¹; I browse my Jira board and tickets in Org-mode², I have Wiktionary lookup³ and Thesaurus⁴ - all in Org-mode. ¹ https://youtu.be/ud3Gmxg5UZg https://youtu.be/ud3Gmxg5UZg ² https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el ³ https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el ⁴ https://github.com/agzam/mw-thesaurus.el https://github.com/agzam/mw-thesaurus.el Comparing Org-mode and Markdown and saying "Markdown is widely used [and thus it's better]" is wildly immature - popularity doesn't determine fitness for purpose - PHP is more widely used than Rust or Zig, but that doesn't make it "better" for systems programming. I can agree, Markdown is adequate for relatively small documents like README files, but it's nowhere close to even try to compete with Org-mode in so many different aspects far beyond just the markdown format structure.
      - drob518 9mo ago
- iLemming 9mo ago
  > We do not need another competing standard here I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system. Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on. Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata. You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose: - Task state tracking - Code execution - Agenda queries - Time-based organization - Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions. When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
- KarlVoit 9mo ago
  You statement gives me the impression that you haven't read a single paragraph from the article you're commenting on.
rw_panic0_0 9mo ago
markdown
noufalibrahim 9mo ago
Org format is reasonably intuitive (so is markdown). But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc. This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.
- jasperry 9mo ago
  The value of Org outside Emacs would be the same value that Markdown has, if it had wider adoption. Voit's post makes a strong argument for Org syntax's ability to serve for all the things Markdown currently does, while being more consistent and concise than Markdown, and so he pushes for it to be more widely adopted. We know that in tech, the better format doesn't always win at first, or ever, but we can advocate!
  - noufalibrahim 9mo ago
    Fair enough. We can argue about the betterness of org but even if so, its enough better enough to push our something as popular as Markdown. The real item of value is org mode.
    - karmakaze 9mo ago
      Exactly. We should all speak/write Esperanto. In the meantime, I'll advocate for evolving Markdown, specifically GFM. I do use a custom keyboard layout, but that doesn't have to interoperate with anything/anyone. Edit: I have a similar unpopular opinion: we should use functional languages and immutable datastructures. At least we some data of movement in that direction with the patterns being adopted by other languages and codebases.
  - maximus-decimus 9mo ago
    org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. it's also a todo app. It also lets you run code like a python notebook. it can show you your tasks in a calendar. I've used "org-mode" todo apps on android, but people complain they can't really use it because it doesn't implement everything. The advantage of the core markdown syntax is that you know it works everywhere and it works everywhere because it's small and easy to implement.
rspoerri 9mo ago
If org more was as successful as markdown it would likely also have a lot of unstandardized additions.
- zelphirkalt 9mo ago
  Though at its current state, it wouldn't need that much more, because it can already do tons of stuff that markdown cannot even start dreaming about.
- KarlVoit 9mo ago
  One of the arguments of the article is that there is a fundamental difference: Markdown was created as a small subset of syntax elements. Therefore, there was a high demand on syntax extensions that were added in a chaotic fashion. Orgdown already comes with more syntax elements that Markdown probably will ever get. So I do see a clear argument for the case that "unstandardized additions" to orgdown are less likely in addition to the fact that there aren't any.
- iLemming 9mo ago
  Org-mode does have certain fragmentation - every Emacs config for Org-mode is different from another - there are entire packages built on top (and they drastically can change the behavior of entire system) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, Org-supertag, etc. Also, for what it is made for, Org-mode is widely successful - there's really not a single contender that can be used alternatively, there's literally no good replacement for it. Comparing Markdown and Org-mode really makes no sense - different ideas, with different design goals, use cases and applications.
tel 9mo ago
I've recently begun replacing Markdown with Gemini's .gmi/gemtext format. It is Markdown with fewer features. I appreciate the simplicity and it's tremendously easy for custom tools to parse. It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off. Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text. My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  I thought I was the only one. It is great for just having some text with headers and links, without any distractions. Only complaint is that it handles line-breaks the way some Markdown variants do, with each line being one paragraph of text. I much prefer line-breaks to be just treated as whitespace and using double breaks to end paragraphs, like e.g. Pandoc's Markdown format (one reason I always use that when I render Markdown).
  - tel 9mo ago
    Definitely not common! Nice to hear I'm not alone either. And yeah, I agree. Practically, it's the thing that annoys me the most day-to-day. I've mostly got wrapping set up to handle it now, but it remains a little finicky.
hahajk 9mo ago
For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that. As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  I have used Emacs on mobile for years. Works great in Termux on Android for instance. I use it daily and with the same .emacs.d (synced using git) as I use on computers, with just a few conditionals in init.el to not load too many bloated dependencies for things I am unlikely to use on my phone anyway.
  - nanomonkey 9mo ago
    I can second this, Termux + Emacs turned my phone back into a personal computer. It is helpful to add extra keys to your touch keyboard, which you can do by editing your termux properties file (see https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard). Helpful when you don't have a hardware keyboard available.
- xenodium 9mo ago
  I’ve built a handful of org based iOS apps. While my initial intention was to bring as much org support to iOS as possible (https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com), my thinking evolved over time and I gravitated towards a different kind of mobile-optimised experience, and so https://journelly.com https://journelly.com was born. I’ve recently added Markdown support too https://xenodium.com/journelly-1-3-released https://xenodium.com/journelly-1-3-released I use Journelly the most and is also my most popular app. I have an org scratch pad and also a habit tracking app https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com.
  - kleinishere 9mo ago
    Happy Journelly user here! Finally a great place to store notes/links on my iPhone in a simple but powerful app for rediscovery. That I can bring to my windows / Linux / Mac eMacs.
arboles 9mo ago
Does Org have a mechanism for escaping its own syntax? Last time I searched, to type *this* (keeping the asterisks) you had to insert a zero-width space (U+200B). In markdown you just escape them with \*this\*.
- 1313ed01 9mo ago
  Did you edit your comment? I was about to begin by saying I could not see how you escaped that, but now I see the backslashes. Looks like even the documentation for org-mode recommends using zero-width spaces: https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html I think org-mode was never primarily about its rendered output. Most users probably, like me, spend a lot of time (hours every day) in various org-mode documents, staring at what is essentially the raw mark-up. Org-mode in Emacs makes only a few minor changes to how the text is displayed, like hiding link targets, so you rarely look at the output. I export less than 1% of my org documents, so usually I don't care at all about what formatting renders like, as long as I get the mark-up correct enough that org-mode itself is functional (links can be followed, sections collapsed etc). The few documents I do want to export I can imagine using workarounds like the zero-width spaces, but it is not like there is often a need to have things looking like org-mode mark-up in the output. For me at least, worrying about escaping mark-up would be too distracting and just add noise, as the raw mark-up is what I will read anyway. But I think some good way to escape things would not be a bad thing to have. BTW there are verbatim blocks that can be used when you have entire lines of non-org content. And of course src-blocks. But that obviously does not handle every case escapes could be useful.
  - arboles 9mo ago
    That was some bad luck. I made an edit seconds after the post came rendered to get the formatting right. (On HN I expected to have to type \\\* to render \* but you just have to type \\*) I understand your use case, I just think it makes it not worthy of comparisons to markdown.
- skeledrew 9mo ago
  What's the use case for escaping its syntax? At top level it's just an arbitrarily nested list.
jameshart 9mo ago
Sure. And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so. Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.
- skeledrew 9mo ago
  Markdown can be trivially embedded in org-mode, so no need to even miss out on that which "won sufficient share": * Org with md block #+begin_src markdown ..... #+end_src Markdown may be a winner, but preferring it when org-mode exists is like tying both arms behind my back and trying to do serious things with my feet.
  - jameshart 9mo ago
    So like, ```org-mode * this is org ``` ?
    - asyncze 9mo ago
      [dead]
    - skeledrew 9mo ago
      Yep. I wouldn't like to see the result of embedding any org of reasonable complexity in md though, while I've embedded pretty complex md in org. And performed various operations on the whole thing, but now we're going from syntax to (Emacs) features.
  - drob518 9mo ago
    I’m not sure I see the benefit in that.
    - skeledrew 9mo ago
skeledrew 9mo ago
I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.
- andai 9mo ago
  >some files going over 15MB in size Word count ~3 million? (~60 novels worth!)
- afroisalreadyin 9mo ago
  I've started using org-mode couple of years ago, and write documents using the basic features like headers and formatting, links between docs, and code sections, but still haven't figured out which power features are the ones worth investing time into, and would be the most useful. Which further features would you recommend digging into, based on your experience?
  - skeledrew 9mo ago
    I consider myself little above basics even after all this time. The features I use depend on what I'm doing at the time, and so I take a JIT approach to learning org-mode. I'd say just keep the main resources close by as they're very detailed, and search them whenever you're thinking of doing X thing.
  - stevekemp 9mo ago
    I suspect this is an issue for most org-mode users, we all use different things. I have two real uses for org-mode; I write a "work log", or "diary", every day I'm at work which keeps track of meetings, tickets/issues I work on, pull-requests I review, etc. Unrelated to that I have a property I rent out, and I keep a table for each year showing rent-received from my tenant. I have a little "database" of previous tenants, and their details. When I add a new table row for this year, say "January 2026 | Sharon | €1000", that updates the global profit/loss table for the document as well as profit/loss for the current year AND a t able which just lists the tenants I've known, how much they paid, and how many months they rented for. Both of these two use-cases use very different things. The diary is just a text-block as template, the financial stuff uses multiple tables, custom elisp code, and some summing operations.
Groxx 9mo ago
AFAICT org-mode has no spec. Still. Decades later. The only spec is a single implementation. Which is probably why approximately nothing else supports it. CommonMark on the other hand is very widely supported and all of them work great together. I'll stick to CommonMark.
- toolslive 9mo ago
  You can say the same about Python. However, there the forces push in the opposite direction: Even when there are better pythony runtimes that provide almost identical behaviour (but better performance), everybody sticks to CPython.
  - Groxx 9mo ago
    I've seen tons of non-cpython use, so I'm not really sure what claim you're trying to make. Aside from supporting "having a spec allows for many implementations that all work".
    - toolslive 9mo ago
      Well, the original comment was implying org mode had limited popularity because there is no specification. I'm claiming cpython is way more popular compared to fe pypy because it has no spec. The typical scenario is: people try pypy. it mostly works but because of some weird problem some library is broken and then they give up.
      - Groxx 9mo ago
        Is the claim that pypy has no spec, but cpython does? By that definition I think either both have a spec (they both use https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html and both are just "an implementation") or neither has one (since neither fully specifies all behavior and all modules, which is probably true for ~all languages).
        9mo ago
jgoodhcg 9mo ago
I love org mode and used eMacs for years. I felt like I had to switch to neovim and thus markdown for lots of reasons. Overall neovim has been a better experience for me but I do miss org mode.
d_sem 9mo ago
And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed. I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.
- dannymi 9mo ago
  For what it's worth, there is this vscode extension https://github.com/realDestroyer/org-vscode/ https://github.com/realDestroyer/org-vscode/ which is pretty neat and can do org-mode task tracking, calendar and agenda view--and HTML preview.
- durazabu 9mo ago
  What do you think about my orgmode obsidian plugin? https://github.com/BBazard/obsidian-orgmode-cm6 https://github.com/BBazard/obsidian-orgmode-cm6
  - dtkav 9mo ago
    Incredible work.
  - d_sem 9mo ago
    very nice. Keep up the good work.
diego898 9mo ago
Will a full complete org mode ever come to vim? A man can hope… Edit: I wonder if the vim community can contribute to a feature bounty like this? Hmm
- phyzix5761 9mo ago
  I added Evil Mode to my emacs and never went back to vim except for some quick edits in the terminal.
getnormality 9mo ago
All well and good, but some Org Mode markup symbols are badly chosen if the purpose is human-to-human communication, and that is a profound demerit for a system that purports to structure and facilitate human-to-human communication. Most notably, asterisks are not good section headers. Pound signs are. So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system. YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.
- adityaathalye 9mo ago
  > Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown. or, reskinned to look visually whatever one wants... https://sophiebos.io/posts/beautifying-emacs-org-mode/ https://sophiebos.io/posts/beautifying-emacs-org-mode/ https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/ https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/ I mention this, because I am not particular about which character symbolises what as long as it is consistent and documented. However, some people do want things to look just so, and for them, few tools come close to Emacs orgmode. One can certainly reskin the plaintext rendering to show up however one wants. This has the downside of "two systems" though, e.g. type ** but see it insta-rendered as ###. Although, I rarely type headings like that (character by character). I use the keybindings to "make header", "indent", "de-indent" etc.
  - getnormality 9mo ago
    Precisely. Emacs folks often talk about how incredibly powerful and flexible their system is, so working with a reskinned Org Mode markup system when dealing with other people's stuff should be completely trivial for them, right? They should consider accommodating less technically sophisticated people for whom different notations are a bigger burden, no?
    - dietr1ch 9mo ago
      The problem isn't customising your editor to use the symbol you want, but to have a spec that allows freely sharing files back and forth without trouble. Org has no specification other editors can follow (although people have tried adding support to other editors and also writing such a spec).
beej71 9mo ago
I use Markdown for all my books, currently. It used to be a custom XML format, but that was really annoying to type even with custom Vim keybindings. I do wish Markdown were more capable, but it's a good lowest common denominator for HTML and PDF. Also Pandoc-flavored markdown is pretty decent. My current flow is: Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML -> page-splitter -> split HTML Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF That last one is slow, and I'm hoping to replace it with Typst, probably: Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> docbook -> xlstproc -> typst -> PDF I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need. In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ
- erichocean 9mo ago
  Repo is nice, thanks. Small nit: it would be nice to have included the final PDF output of your tool on `test.md` in the repo.
  - emil-lp 9mo ago
    That's not a "nit", that's a request, and for someone with the same process, it would be really annoying. There's a reason you don't want generated data under version control.
    - erichocean 9mo ago
      Is a link in the README to an example PDF really too much to ask? I don't think so, but again, it's a nit.
- creata 9mo ago
  > I'm hoping to replace it with Typst This might be stupid but is there a reason you want to go through docbook and xsltproc instead of setting --pdf-engine=typst?
jenadine 9mo ago
Using parentheses to delimit the URL is one thing I don't like about markdown, since parentheses are valid in URL curly braces or angle bracket would have been a better choice.
itmitica 9mo ago
Question: why is `https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/` in html and not in ... org mode?
- creata 9mo ago
  Looking at the markup of some pages, such as https://orgmode.org/Changes.html https://orgmode.org/Changes.html , at least parts of the website seem to have been generated from Org mode.
  - itmitica 9mo ago
    Yeah, but still not org mode.
    - creata 9mo ago
      Well, I'm not sure why that matters, but you can replace .html with .org in the URL and get the Org file.
- tgbugs 9mo ago
  It is [0]. All the pages are generated from org sources. If you scroll to the bottom of any page there is a link. Also tec used to have an overlay that would show you the org source directly, but ultimately it was decided that it should not be enabled because it required javascript and could be confusing. 0. https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/orgweb https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/orgweb
IshKebab 9mo ago
Hmm with the way people go on about it I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that. He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!". Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?
- dandersch 9mo ago
  > I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that. That is because the post focuses on org-mode: the markup language. But there is also org-mode: the agenda tracker, org-mode: the literate programming system, org-mode: the spreadsheet, org-mode: the website publishing system, org-mode: the document writing system, org-mode the time-tracking system, org-mode: the personal wiki, etc.
- vga42 9mo ago
  >Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown? I think the reason in general is simply that org-mode is better, i.e. more carefully defined. I'll mention the things I like more specifically: - Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes. Org-mode is [[link][description]]. - Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing. - Markdown blocks are freaking awful and seem to work by luck more than anything else. Code blocks even worse -- they are made by indenting 4 spaces or a tab! I couldn't come up with a worse way to do that even if I tried. Org-mode has clear #BEGIN_xxx / #END_xxx blocks. - Markdown has a weird YAML frontmatter syntax. Org-mode has keywords which can be attached to the whole document and properties, which can be attached to every heading. - Org-mode has tags. - Org-mode has timestamps.
  - IshKebab 9mo ago
    > Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes I can remember it fairly easily. [Link](url). Very unconvinced by this. > Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing. * for lists is what I would naturally use so I think that's better than - (but Markdown actually supports both). I'll give you * for italics though. Definitely should have been bold. > - Markdown blocks are freaking awful and seem to work by luck more than anything else. Code blocks even worse -- they are made by indenting 4 spaces or a tab! I couldn't come up with a worse way to do that even if I tried. Org-mode has clear #BEGIN_xxx / #END_xxx blocks. Sorry but there's no way #BEGIN_xxx is better than ``` or 4-space indent. > Markdown has a weird YAML frontmatter syntax. It doesn't. That's some extension. Maybe Pandoc? > Org-mode has tags. Yeah they look kind of useful. > Org-mode has timestamps. Can't say I've ever remotely wanted that feature... Overall it seems like a wash.
indymike 9mo ago
Org mode is great for outline like documents. Markdown is great for paragraph-like documents. I've used both for a long time, and have found markdown to be a poor replacement for org-mode and org-mode to be a bad replacement for markdown.
tconfrey 9mo ago
I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown. That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both? Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date. Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text! [0] https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Org-for-interop.html https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...
- spankibalt 9mo ago
  > "Either way I think the losers are going to be [...] maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date." Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial. Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF). And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.
- internet_points 9mo ago
  llm's handle org-mode just fine in my experience. It's not like there's a dearth of org-mode to train on on the internet.
- 9mo ago
827a 9mo ago
The only reason why Org mode doesn’t have twenty variants like Markdown is because no one uses it.
- iLemming 9mo ago
  Sure - florists, influencers and soccer moms don't use Org-mode. Real hackers do, because it is extremely developer-oriented. And of course it won't ever be more popular, simply because there are far more soccer moms in the world and not too many hackers.
  - 827a 9mo ago
    To be clear: I mean "no one uses org mode" hyperbolically, but there's a causative reason why markdown's popularity has led to twenty variants: When a ton of people use anything, it often needs to be tweaked to fit many different use-cases. If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants; its characteristic of being highly consistent is not a reflection of some internal design or authority that aligns it toward consistency; its a reflection of dispopularity. I am aware of no evidence supporting the claim that orgmode is more developer-oriented than markdown. It is identical to markdown in ~80% of the formatting directives people widely use. The remaining ~20% are mostly stylistic choices (would you rather hit the # key or the % key). Most of the unique capabilities orgmode offers (e.g. programming language syntax highlighting) are functionally covered by popular markdown extensions available everywhere someone interacting with markdown would work (e.g. Github, Obsidian). This is a religious war, not engineering. Use what works for you.
    - iLemming 9mo ago
      This isn't a "religious war", because similarities of Markdown and Org-mode are only superficial, once you learn more about the differences, you will see what actually makes Org-mode much, much different. - Org's outline is semantic - the nesting IS the data structure. You can collapse/expand, refile, navigate as a tree natively. Markdown treats `#` markers as decoration on top of flat text. - Org drawers, properties, timestamps are integrated. Markdown frontmatter is bolted on. - Org has in-buffer table editing. Markdown tables are write-once text blobs. - Org can execute code blocks and weave results back into the document. Markdown extensions can display code, but they don't integrate execution. - Org can track what links to what, rename headings and update links automatically. Your claim of the "20% stylistic" is just wrong - those feature differences aren't cosmetic - they do change how you use the tool for knowledge work. > If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants Org-mode does have fragmentation - it's just vertical (depth of features) rather than horizontal (incompatible variants) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, et al. Org-mode is less "one format" and more "a Lisp-cursed toolkit where everyone assembles their own variant through configuration" The Markdown variants are at least standardized incompatibility - you kinda know what GFM does. With Org, you don't really know what someone's personal setup supports until you try it. If Org-mode had GitHub's reach and people were pushing personal variants of the spec onto the web, you'd absolutely see 20+ "Org-flavored Markdown" projects. The consistency is partly an accident of Org being the domain of power users who configure rather than fork. There's no "causative reason" for why markdown is more popular than Org - the entire argument is just nonsense. Nobody in the right mind (with the proper Org-mode experience) would ever argue "which is better". It's like arguing LaTeX vs. Word - LaTeX is clearly technically superior for certain tasks, even though Word won institutional dominance - but only those who have very little exposure to LaTeX would argue that "Word's popularity proves it's better designed...", or something.
Derbasti 9mo ago
Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things. Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't. That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative. I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.
- stackghost 9mo ago
  >I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. Me too. I went to Jekyll and I thought I'd miss org but it turns out I don't. Plus I still get a slow lisp-like language (ruby) just like elisp. Org is a neat idea but nothing supports it. You can get a jupyter-like experience with src blocks but have fun sharing it with anyone unless you only interact with other emacs users. Markdown is merely acceptable, IMHO, but everything supports it, so it's the clear choice in my book.
  - WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago
    Its completely trivial to export orgmode to markdown either as a process or just whenever you copy to the clipboard. Completely trivial isn't a big barrier to interoperation.
    - stackghost 9mo ago
      Sure but each "completely trivial" step adds complexity to the overall process, which makes it brittle. I'd rather just write in markdown than have to spend hours upon hours reading the awful emacs docs. I have a thousand things to do and no time. Org might be better, but it's not better enough.
cyrialize 9mo ago
I've been using Org Mode for organizing my life in plain text for the past 10 years now. Beorg on iOS [0] makes it great. I've also started using things like org-ql [1] and org-super-agenda [2] to make me even more productive. I also have a daily log org file I use at work. It helps me keep track of what I need to do and what I've done. It makes yearly reviews easier as well! [0]: https://www.beorgapp.com/ https://www.beorgapp.com/ [1]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql [2]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda
- tconfrey 9mo ago
  Hi @cyrialize , Hopefully this is an acceptable level of self-promotion. It sounds like my browser extension, BrainTool might be useful in your workflow. It's kindof a bookmark/tab management tool. It syncs to a .org file and allows you to do things like mark tabs as a TODO, which you can then track in org-agenda etc. There's some brief descriptions and videos here: https://braintool.org/2025/09/16/Browser-Workflows-with-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2025/09/16/Browser-Workflows-with-Brai...
  - cyrialize 9mo ago
    Oh wow this looks really awesome! I'll have to check it out. I unfortunately primarily use Firefox, but still this is great. I've manually tried to keep track of bookmarks via org, but of course I'll always forget to update it.
- kleinishere 9mo ago
  I’ve looked into a log/journal date tree approach with my various activities across the day (meeting notes, independent work notes, etc) under the date. But then I prefer being able to look through headings that anchor on context first, then dates second (/eventually). Does your daily log link to other parts of one org file, or other org files? I’ve asked LLMs their opinions. But curious for yours! Also thinking about trying denote. The filenames begin with dates, then use tags/keywords to keep the thread on recurring topics.
otikik 9mo ago
It would get more adoption if it wasn’t tied to the waist to emacs. Markdown doesn’t require Vim.
- justinhj 9mo ago
  There are attempts to extract it but I'm not sure any are successful. org mode is so tightly intertwined with Emacs features. For example tables can have calculations where the expressions are implemented in emacs lisp and can use emacs calc functions org babel, which allows execution of code in blocks on the page and communication between them requires Emacs's comint (command interpreter) which would need to be ported to whatever application "displays" the text. Folding and unfolding headlines requires the exact same display features that emacs has. In general it seems the link is so tightly bound that it would be as well to simply embed Emacs in an application rather than extract org mode from it.
- KarlVoit 9mo ago
  Orgdown doesn't require Emacs either: https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool... Tadaaaa! Furthermore: Markdown requires a magic crystal ball to tell which Markdown flavor it actually is and how to process it for machines. Read the article. Markdown would get more things done if it wasn't tied to the waist to chaos. ;-)
  - otikik 9mo ago
    I’m not attacking your thing. I’m not contesting that people have written articles about emacs-less org mode in the past. But they have simply not caught on
    - KarlVoit 9mo ago
      My thing? ;-) My things are pretty much safe because I usually do risk analysis before I'm using new tools according to https://karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-choices/ https://karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-choices/ The purpose of the article is to make it a bit more transparent for people using Markdown-based tools that they still have some lock-in effects in place - depending how they are using one of the MD variants. You're certainly right about the low level of popularity of orgdown. However, this was not the main purpose of the article and I made it very clear that there are many LMLs out there that do not come with the downsides of MD mentioned in the article. So even when you never ever touch org-mode or orgdown, this article is highly relevant to MD users. From that perspective, it's quite irrelevant if orgdown has caught on even though there are plenty of applications outside of Emacs that are able to use that syntax: https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...
justinhj 9mo ago
I love writing blog posts with org mode. I wrote a blog post about blog posting in org mode. https://justinhj.github.io/2020/03/09/how-to-blog-with-org-mode.html https://justinhj.github.io/2020/03/09/how-to-blog-with-org-m... I wrote some code that exports html to a Jekyll static site, but really it works with anything that expects html.
dctoedt 9mo ago
For me, org-mode's big advantage over Markdown is org-mode's macro capability. For years I've been using emacs and org-mode to develop my online course book; each semester I export the then-current draft in HTML to post on the Web. I use lots of macros to expand text, evaluate emacs lisp expressions, etc. Example: In an upcoming revision, I'm wrestling with what to call the book's model contract clauses, so {{{NOUN-C}}} expands to "Clause" or "Rule" or "Plan" or "Protocol" depending on my current vacillation state. Other macros include {{{NOUN-C}}} as components. Example: At the top of the HTML page there's a date stamp as a macro that evaluates an emacs lisp expression. I'm not posting a link here because the HN effect might bust out my (paid) usage limits at my host, site44.com. That's a great hosting site, by the way, with terrific support by one of its two people (founders, I'd guess). It automatically syncs a dedicated folder I maintain on Dropbox, so all I have to do is save changes to that folder and seconds later the change shows up at the online version.
bitwize 9mo ago
But what's really gonna bake your noodle is the revelation that Emacs is one of the most reasonable ways to edit text.
ggm 9mo ago
Given pandoc, as well as Emacs export tools if you stick to a minimum, you generally can move between a lot of formats freely. If I live in org mode for work tracking, I can also be in README.md trivially.
franga2000 9mo ago
The whole "markdown isn't standardised" point is just bullshit. Any place that supports markdown will support the basics and some places having extra features is a good thing! The only thing worse than not having a feature you need in some app is not having that feature in any app. And the differences that exist between implementations are there for a reason. Do you think chat apps would let you have headings or footnotes or whatever if they used org mode syntax? No, they don't want to give you those formatting options, so if they used org mode instead of Markdown, they'd just rip it out of there too. And now you have the same problem.
KarlVoit 9mo ago
Author of the article here: It hurts me to read through the comments. One part of the people who commented obviously didn't read the article they're commenting on. And another part of the commenters does mix up Org-mode, the Elisp implementation within Emacs, with orgdown, the lightweight syntax which is actually the topic of this article. This part of the discussion is totally missing the whole point of my article: practical issues related to Markdown; choosing any other LML which doesn't come with those downsides. Orgdown was just one example of many which I wanted to mention because it is one of the least known alternatives outside the Emacs bubble. I extended the article accordingly and also answered to a comment that came via email. HTH

287 points by adityaathalye 9mo ago

throw__away7391 9mo ago

We do not need another competing standard here. Markdown is adequate and more importantly widely adopted and growing.

cenamus 9mo ago
org-mode's first release was in 2003, Markdown apparently in 2004. So not just "yet another standard" And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown? It's more like having python notebooks right in there (any language really).
- rgoulter 9mo ago
  > And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown I think the neatest part of org-babel is the source code block execution, & the various ways it supports for configuring output. This allows for org files to be "plaintext notebooks" (like jupyter in plaintext"). -- It's really surprising that this part is not more common. More niche is the "babel" part of that: because the code blocks can take variables as inputs, and output values, this allows a polyglot notebook where values from e.g. Python get passed to R and plotted or so. -- Cute idea, although I've never found it too useful. The supported types are (unsurprisingly) limited, and the language support for code blocks is held together by duct tape. (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?) Of course, org also has a long tail of neat features (like how each heading can have properties attached to it, as well as tags, and the task management that relates to this).
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    > It's really surprising that this part is not more common. I think it is because of low Emacs adoption and other editors not having enough support. The problem with polyglot notebook workflow is probably, that you can only use it well for small data, or at least not big data, because who wants to have a million lines of output suddenly appear in the buffer, only to then read them as input for the next language ... That would be a tremendous amount of computational overhead. And if we didn't have that, we would need a way to pass a proper value from one language to the other. What I also like is, that you can define code blocks that are used as formulas for spreadsheets (tables) inside the document. That's quite powerful too. > (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?) I don't find it very awful to use. I have used that for working through computer programming books and it was fabulous.
  - fipar 9mo ago
    I agree about the duct tape, which I also use often around the house, so maybe that's why I like org-babel :) Just wanted to say that I share data between different blocks in different languages through files and env variables (I add :session shared to the src blocks that need to access this). That is useful also to have src blocks you can execute repeatedly and that depend on something like an aws identity being assumed (you just assume it in the first block that shares the session). I agree it's messy, it's just a mess that works for me.
    - alexisread 9mo ago
      I think this is the crux of the issue, use like this is like a real program, just built up incrementally in a notebook rather than a repl or shell-with-pipes, and with manual error handling. The STEPS project was all about this- a way of incrementally building blocks that can be composed. With org mode in mind, ideally you would have language support for this ie. Comments are scoped metadata that can be formatted, tested, linked etc. You need a well defined spec like djot as a DSL for this to work, so that parsers can be easily written for it. This level of language support allows many different views onto the source code. We’re not there yet.
- least 9mo ago
  Babel features are kind of a moot point if you’re just talking about the syntax, which seems to be the purpose of the post. Most of the reason to use org mode is tied to emacs. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something similar with markdown code blocks if someone were so inclined. But that’s tool dependent, not syntax. I sort of agree with Karl’s point about there being too many standards of markdown, but I doubt org mode would have survived the same level of popularity without suffering the same fate. It doesn’t help that there is no standard for org mode. You can only really use and take advantage of its power in emacs. It isn’t susceptible to lossy transformations because there’s only one real org mode editor.
  - zelphirkalt 9mo ago
    Well, but I am not aware of anyone having come up with a good syntax to do babel things in Markdown. Markdown and Org Mode also set out to serve different purposes. For a quick and dirty text Markdown might suffice, but the babel stuff and spreadsheet stuff enable a lot of use cases that Markdown simply doesn't cater to. We already have the implementation of all these nice things in Emacs. If we were to replicate them for some markdown dialect, they would probably be done half-right, before someone actually manages to get literate programming right for various languages, including what code to translate to, how to wrap or not wrap the code that is inside blocks, sessions, output formats, etc. We might as well use what we have with Emacs. There is probably a way to call Emacs' functionality from outside of Emacs, to treat it as a library. But not all is well with Org Mode syntax either. Many git hosters have only a very rudimentary implementation of a parser and writing a parser for it is not actually that easy. Its dynamic nature requires at least a 2 step approach of parsing and then later checking all kinds of definitions at the top of a file and further processing the document according to that. It's power comes at that cost. That's probably why we have so many Markdowns, but only one Org Mode (OK maybe a few, counting Vim and VSCodium plugins, that achieve a feature subset). I will say though, that org mode syntax is much better suited for writing technical documentation than markdown. The only issue is, that not so many people know it or want to learn it, and I don't know a way to change that. Perhaps that effort to have the org mode syntax separately defined (https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Overview.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Over...) by the same author will help creating more support for the format in various tools.
- throw__away7391 9mo ago
  A) I'm aware and B) so what? Markdown is popular enough now that even people who aren't very technical and don't know that they're reading/writing Markdown are familiar with it. This is incredibly valuable and not something you can replicate through purely technical means, there are so many places where having a ubiquitous way to express in plain text is helpful. Markdown has grown into this role at the same time that the environment developed. You will not be able to recreate this situation.
binary132 9mo ago
I don’t think anyone who gets really familiar with org can ever honestly say with a straight face that Markdown is adequate in comparison.
- drob518 9mo ago
  “Adequate” is a very relative term. Adequate for what? The fact that Markdown is widely used quite successfully demonstrates that it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks. Yes, Org mode might cover more of the long tail, but Markdown clearly covers all the important cases to the point that it has achieved wide adoption.
  - iLemming 9mo ago
    > it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks Is it though? Like for example, I often deal with Org-mode documents of several thousand lines of text and I honestly don't know any piece of software that can acceptably handle multi-thousand lines of markdown. Emacs/Org-mode has tons of different ways to navigate and search through these large bodies - the outline nature of the structure is perfect for that - there's narrowing, collapsing/expanding, sparse-tree search, flexible sorting, indirect buffers, imenu, overlays and text properties that can render the text conditionally, etc. I read HN and Reddit threads in Org-mode format¹; I browse my Jira board and tickets in Org-mode², I have Wiktionary lookup³ and Thesaurus⁴ - all in Org-mode. ¹ https://youtu.be/ud3Gmxg5UZg https://youtu.be/ud3Gmxg5UZg ² https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el https://github.com/agzam/go-jira.el ³ https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el https://github.com/agzam/wiktionary-bro.el ⁴ https://github.com/agzam/mw-thesaurus.el https://github.com/agzam/mw-thesaurus.el Comparing Org-mode and Markdown and saying "Markdown is widely used [and thus it's better]" is wildly immature - popularity doesn't determine fitness for purpose - PHP is more widely used than Rust or Zig, but that doesn't make it "better" for systems programming. I can agree, Markdown is adequate for relatively small documents like README files, but it's nowhere close to even try to compete with Org-mode in so many different aspects far beyond just the markdown format structure.
    - drob518 9mo ago
iLemming 9mo ago
> We do not need another competing standard here I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system. Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on. Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata. You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose: - Task state tracking - Code execution - Agenda queries - Time-based organization - Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions. When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
KarlVoit 9mo ago
You statement gives me the impression that you haven't read a single paragraph from the article you're commenting on.

rw_panic0_0 9mo ago

markdown

noufalibrahim 9mo ago

Org format is reasonably intuitive (so is markdown). But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc. This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.

jasperry 9mo ago
The value of Org outside Emacs would be the same value that Markdown has, if it had wider adoption. Voit's post makes a strong argument for Org syntax's ability to serve for all the things Markdown currently does, while being more consistent and concise than Markdown, and so he pushes for it to be more widely adopted. We know that in tech, the better format doesn't always win at first, or ever, but we can advocate!
- noufalibrahim 9mo ago
  Fair enough. We can argue about the betterness of org but even if so, its enough better enough to push our something as popular as Markdown. The real item of value is org mode.
  - karmakaze 9mo ago
    Exactly. We should all speak/write Esperanto. In the meantime, I'll advocate for evolving Markdown, specifically GFM. I do use a custom keyboard layout, but that doesn't have to interoperate with anything/anyone. Edit: I have a similar unpopular opinion: we should use functional languages and immutable datastructures. At least we some data of movement in that direction with the patterns being adopted by other languages and codebases.
- maximus-decimus 9mo ago
  org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. it's also a todo app. It also lets you run code like a python notebook. it can show you your tasks in a calendar. I've used "org-mode" todo apps on android, but people complain they can't really use it because it doesn't implement everything. The advantage of the core markdown syntax is that you know it works everywhere and it works everywhere because it's small and easy to implement.

rspoerri 9mo ago

If org more was as successful as markdown it would likely also have a lot of unstandardized additions.

zelphirkalt 9mo ago
Though at its current state, it wouldn't need that much more, because it can already do tons of stuff that markdown cannot even start dreaming about.
KarlVoit 9mo ago
One of the arguments of the article is that there is a fundamental difference: Markdown was created as a small subset of syntax elements. Therefore, there was a high demand on syntax extensions that were added in a chaotic fashion. Orgdown already comes with more syntax elements that Markdown probably will ever get. So I do see a clear argument for the case that "unstandardized additions" to orgdown are less likely in addition to the fact that there aren't any.
iLemming 9mo ago
Org-mode does have certain fragmentation - every Emacs config for Org-mode is different from another - there are entire packages built on top (and they drastically can change the behavior of entire system) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, Org-supertag, etc. Also, for what it is made for, Org-mode is widely successful - there's really not a single contender that can be used alternatively, there's literally no good replacement for it. Comparing Markdown and Org-mode really makes no sense - different ideas, with different design goals, use cases and applications.

tel 9mo ago

I've recently begun replacing Markdown with Gemini's .gmi/gemtext format. It is Markdown with fewer features. I appreciate the simplicity and it's tremendously easy for custom tools to parse. It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off. Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text. My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.

1313ed01 9mo ago
I thought I was the only one. It is great for just having some text with headers and links, without any distractions. Only complaint is that it handles line-breaks the way some Markdown variants do, with each line being one paragraph of text. I much prefer line-breaks to be just treated as whitespace and using double breaks to end paragraphs, like e.g. Pandoc's Markdown format (one reason I always use that when I render Markdown).
- tel 9mo ago
  Definitely not common! Nice to hear I'm not alone either. And yeah, I agree. Practically, it's the thing that annoys me the most day-to-day. I've mostly got wrapping set up to handle it now, but it remains a little finicky.

hahajk 9mo ago

For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that. As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.

1313ed01 9mo ago
I have used Emacs on mobile for years. Works great in Termux on Android for instance. I use it daily and with the same .emacs.d (synced using git) as I use on computers, with just a few conditionals in init.el to not load too many bloated dependencies for things I am unlikely to use on my phone anyway.
- nanomonkey 9mo ago
  I can second this, Termux + Emacs turned my phone back into a personal computer. It is helpful to add extra keys to your touch keyboard, which you can do by editing your termux properties file (see https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Touch_Keyboard). Helpful when you don't have a hardware keyboard available.
xenodium 9mo ago
I’ve built a handful of org based iOS apps. While my initial intention was to bring as much org support to iOS as possible (https://plainorg.com https://plainorg.com), my thinking evolved over time and I gravitated towards a different kind of mobile-optimised experience, and so https://journelly.com https://journelly.com was born. I’ve recently added Markdown support too https://xenodium.com/journelly-1-3-released https://xenodium.com/journelly-1-3-released I use Journelly the most and is also my most popular app. I have an org scratch pad and also a habit tracking app https://flathabits.com https://flathabits.com.
- kleinishere 9mo ago
  Happy Journelly user here! Finally a great place to store notes/links on my iPhone in a simple but powerful app for rediscovery. That I can bring to my windows / Linux / Mac eMacs.

arboles 9mo ago

Does Org have a mechanism for escaping its own syntax? Last time I searched, to type *this* (keeping the asterisks) you had to insert a zero-width space (U+200B). In markdown you just escape them with \*this\*.

1313ed01 9mo ago
Did you edit your comment? I was about to begin by saying I could not see how you escaped that, but now I see the backslashes. Looks like even the documentation for org-mode recommends using zero-width spaces: https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Escape-Character.html I think org-mode was never primarily about its rendered output. Most users probably, like me, spend a lot of time (hours every day) in various org-mode documents, staring at what is essentially the raw mark-up. Org-mode in Emacs makes only a few minor changes to how the text is displayed, like hiding link targets, so you rarely look at the output. I export less than 1% of my org documents, so usually I don't care at all about what formatting renders like, as long as I get the mark-up correct enough that org-mode itself is functional (links can be followed, sections collapsed etc). The few documents I do want to export I can imagine using workarounds like the zero-width spaces, but it is not like there is often a need to have things looking like org-mode mark-up in the output. For me at least, worrying about escaping mark-up would be too distracting and just add noise, as the raw mark-up is what I will read anyway. But I think some good way to escape things would not be a bad thing to have. BTW there are verbatim blocks that can be used when you have entire lines of non-org content. And of course src-blocks. But that obviously does not handle every case escapes could be useful.
- arboles 9mo ago
  That was some bad luck. I made an edit seconds after the post came rendered to get the formatting right. (On HN I expected to have to type \\\* to render \* but you just have to type \\*) I understand your use case, I just think it makes it not worthy of comparisons to markdown.
skeledrew 9mo ago
What's the use case for escaping its syntax? At top level it's just an arbitrarily nested list.

jameshart 9mo ago

Sure. And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so. Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.

skeledrew 9mo ago
Markdown can be trivially embedded in org-mode, so no need to even miss out on that which "won sufficient share": * Org with md block #+begin_src markdown ..... #+end_src Markdown may be a winner, but preferring it when org-mode exists is like tying both arms behind my back and trying to do serious things with my feet.
- jameshart 9mo ago
  So like, ```org-mode * this is org ``` ?
  - asyncze 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - skeledrew 9mo ago
    Yep. I wouldn't like to see the result of embedding any org of reasonable complexity in md though, while I've embedded pretty complex md in org. And performed various operations on the whole thing, but now we're going from syntax to (Emacs) features.
- drob518 9mo ago
  I’m not sure I see the benefit in that.
  - skeledrew 9mo ago

skeledrew 9mo ago

I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.

andai 9mo ago
>some files going over 15MB in size Word count ~3 million? (~60 novels worth!)
afroisalreadyin 9mo ago
I've started using org-mode couple of years ago, and write documents using the basic features like headers and formatting, links between docs, and code sections, but still haven't figured out which power features are the ones worth investing time into, and would be the most useful. Which further features would you recommend digging into, based on your experience?
- skeledrew 9mo ago
  I consider myself little above basics even after all this time. The features I use depend on what I'm doing at the time, and so I take a JIT approach to learning org-mode. I'd say just keep the main resources close by as they're very detailed, and search them whenever you're thinking of doing X thing.
- stevekemp 9mo ago
  I suspect this is an issue for most org-mode users, we all use different things. I have two real uses for org-mode; I write a "work log", or "diary", every day I'm at work which keeps track of meetings, tickets/issues I work on, pull-requests I review, etc. Unrelated to that I have a property I rent out, and I keep a table for each year showing rent-received from my tenant. I have a little "database" of previous tenants, and their details. When I add a new table row for this year, say "January 2026 | Sharon | €1000", that updates the global profit/loss table for the document as well as profit/loss for the current year AND a t able which just lists the tenants I've known, how much they paid, and how many months they rented for. Both of these two use-cases use very different things. The diary is just a text-block as template, the financial stuff uses multiple tables, custom elisp code, and some summing operations.

Groxx 9mo ago

AFAICT org-mode has no spec. Still. Decades later. The only spec is a single implementation. Which is probably why approximately nothing else supports it. CommonMark on the other hand is very widely supported and all of them work great together. I'll stick to CommonMark.

toolslive 9mo ago
You can say the same about Python. However, there the forces push in the opposite direction: Even when there are better pythony runtimes that provide almost identical behaviour (but better performance), everybody sticks to CPython.
- Groxx 9mo ago
  I've seen tons of non-cpython use, so I'm not really sure what claim you're trying to make. Aside from supporting "having a spec allows for many implementations that all work".
  - toolslive 9mo ago
    Well, the original comment was implying org mode had limited popularity because there is no specification. I'm claiming cpython is way more popular compared to fe pypy because it has no spec. The typical scenario is: people try pypy. it mostly works but because of some weird problem some library is broken and then they give up.
    - Groxx 9mo ago
      Is the claim that pypy has no spec, but cpython does? By that definition I think either both have a spec (they both use https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html and both are just "an implementation") or neither has one (since neither fully specifies all behavior and all modules, which is probably true for ~all languages).
      - 9mo ago

jgoodhcg 9mo ago

I love org mode and used eMacs for years. I felt like I had to switch to neovim and thus markdown for lots of reasons. Overall neovim has been a better experience for me but I do miss org mode.

d_sem 9mo ago

And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed. I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.

dannymi 9mo ago
For what it's worth, there is this vscode extension https://github.com/realDestroyer/org-vscode/ https://github.com/realDestroyer/org-vscode/ which is pretty neat and can do org-mode task tracking, calendar and agenda view--and HTML preview.
durazabu 9mo ago
What do you think about my orgmode obsidian plugin? https://github.com/BBazard/obsidian-orgmode-cm6 https://github.com/BBazard/obsidian-orgmode-cm6
- dtkav 9mo ago
  Incredible work.
- d_sem 9mo ago
  very nice. Keep up the good work.

diego898 9mo ago

Will a full complete org mode ever come to vim? A man can hope… Edit: I wonder if the vim community can contribute to a feature bounty like this? Hmm

phyzix5761 9mo ago
I added Evil Mode to my emacs and never went back to vim except for some quick edits in the terminal.

getnormality 9mo ago

All well and good, but some Org Mode markup symbols are badly chosen if the purpose is human-to-human communication, and that is a profound demerit for a system that purports to structure and facilitate human-to-human communication. Most notably, asterisks are not good section headers. Pound signs are. So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system. YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.

adityaathalye 9mo ago
> Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown. or, reskinned to look visually whatever one wants... https://sophiebos.io/posts/beautifying-emacs-org-mode/ https://sophiebos.io/posts/beautifying-emacs-org-mode/ https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/ https://zzamboni.org/post/beautifying-org-mode-in-emacs/ I mention this, because I am not particular about which character symbolises what as long as it is consistent and documented. However, some people do want things to look just so, and for them, few tools come close to Emacs orgmode. One can certainly reskin the plaintext rendering to show up however one wants. This has the downside of "two systems" though, e.g. type ** but see it insta-rendered as ###. Although, I rarely type headings like that (character by character). I use the keybindings to "make header", "indent", "de-indent" etc.
- getnormality 9mo ago
  Precisely. Emacs folks often talk about how incredibly powerful and flexible their system is, so working with a reskinned Org Mode markup system when dealing with other people's stuff should be completely trivial for them, right? They should consider accommodating less technically sophisticated people for whom different notations are a bigger burden, no?
  - dietr1ch 9mo ago
    The problem isn't customising your editor to use the symbol you want, but to have a spec that allows freely sharing files back and forth without trouble. Org has no specification other editors can follow (although people have tried adding support to other editors and also writing such a spec).

beej71 9mo ago

I use Markdown for all my books, currently. It used to be a custom XML format, but that was really annoying to type even with custom Vim keybindings. I do wish Markdown were more capable, but it's a good lowest common denominator for HTML and PDF. Also Pandoc-flavored markdown is pretty decent. My current flow is: Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML -> page-splitter -> split HTML Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF That last one is slow, and I'm hoping to replace it with Typst, probably: Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> docbook -> xlstproc -> typst -> PDF I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need. In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ

erichocean 9mo ago
Repo is nice, thanks. Small nit: it would be nice to have included the final PDF output of your tool on `test.md` in the repo.
- emil-lp 9mo ago
  That's not a "nit", that's a request, and for someone with the same process, it would be really annoying. There's a reason you don't want generated data under version control.
  - erichocean 9mo ago
    Is a link in the README to an example PDF really too much to ask? I don't think so, but again, it's a nit.
creata 9mo ago
> I'm hoping to replace it with Typst This might be stupid but is there a reason you want to go through docbook and xsltproc instead of setting --pdf-engine=typst?

jenadine 9mo ago

Using parentheses to delimit the URL is one thing I don't like about markdown, since parentheses are valid in URL curly braces or angle bracket would have been a better choice.

itmitica 9mo ago

Question: why is `https://orgmode.org/ https://orgmode.org/` in html and not in ... org mode?

creata 9mo ago
Looking at the markup of some pages, such as https://orgmode.org/Changes.html https://orgmode.org/Changes.html , at least parts of the website seem to have been generated from Org mode.
- itmitica 9mo ago
  Yeah, but still not org mode.
  - creata 9mo ago
    Well, I'm not sure why that matters, but you can replace .html with .org in the URL and get the Org file.
tgbugs 9mo ago
It is [0]. All the pages are generated from org sources. If you scroll to the bottom of any page there is a link. Also tec used to have an overlay that would show you the org source directly, but ultimately it was decided that it should not be enabled because it required javascript and could be confusing. 0. https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/orgweb https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/orgweb

IshKebab 9mo ago

Hmm with the way people go on about it I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that. He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!". Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?

dandersch 9mo ago
> I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that. That is because the post focuses on org-mode: the markup language. But there is also org-mode: the agenda tracker, org-mode: the literate programming system, org-mode: the spreadsheet, org-mode: the website publishing system, org-mode: the document writing system, org-mode the time-tracking system, org-mode: the personal wiki, etc.
vga42 9mo ago
>Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown? I think the reason in general is simply that org-mode is better, i.e. more carefully defined. I'll mention the things I like more specifically: - Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes. Org-mode is [[link][description]]. - Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing. - Markdown blocks are freaking awful and seem to work by luck more than anything else. Code blocks even worse -- they are made by indenting 4 spaces or a tab! I couldn't come up with a worse way to do that even if I tried. Org-mode has clear #BEGIN_xxx / #END_xxx blocks. - Markdown has a weird YAML frontmatter syntax. Org-mode has keywords which can be attached to the whole document and properties, which can be attached to every heading. - Org-mode has tags. - Org-mode has timestamps.
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  > Link syntax in markdown is something I never remember how it goes I can remember it fairly easily. [Link](url). Very unconvinced by this. > Text styles in org-mode make more sense. In markdown, * is used for italics, * for bold. Additionally, * is for lists, which might be confusing. * for lists is what I would naturally use so I think that's better than - (but Markdown actually supports both). I'll give you * for italics though. Definitely should have been bold. > - Markdown blocks are freaking awful and seem to work by luck more than anything else. Code blocks even worse -- they are made by indenting 4 spaces or a tab! I couldn't come up with a worse way to do that even if I tried. Org-mode has clear #BEGIN_xxx / #END_xxx blocks. Sorry but there's no way #BEGIN_xxx is better than ``` or 4-space indent. > Markdown has a weird YAML frontmatter syntax. It doesn't. That's some extension. Maybe Pandoc? > Org-mode has tags. Yeah they look kind of useful. > Org-mode has timestamps. Can't say I've ever remotely wanted that feature... Overall it seems like a wash.

indymike 9mo ago

Org mode is great for outline like documents. Markdown is great for paragraph-like documents. I've used both for a long time, and have found markdown to be a poor replacement for org-mode and org-mode to be a bad replacement for markdown.

tconfrey 9mo ago

I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown. That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both? Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date. Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text! [0] https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Org-for-interop.html https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...

spankibalt 9mo ago
> "Either way I think the losers are going to be [...] maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date." Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial. Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF). And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.
internet_points 9mo ago
llm's handle org-mode just fine in my experience. It's not like there's a dearth of org-mode to train on on the internet.
9mo ago

827a 9mo ago

The only reason why Org mode doesn’t have twenty variants like Markdown is because no one uses it.

iLemming 9mo ago
Sure - florists, influencers and soccer moms don't use Org-mode. Real hackers do, because it is extremely developer-oriented. And of course it won't ever be more popular, simply because there are far more soccer moms in the world and not too many hackers.
- 827a 9mo ago
  To be clear: I mean "no one uses org mode" hyperbolically, but there's a causative reason why markdown's popularity has led to twenty variants: When a ton of people use anything, it often needs to be tweaked to fit many different use-cases. If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants; its characteristic of being highly consistent is not a reflection of some internal design or authority that aligns it toward consistency; its a reflection of dispopularity. I am aware of no evidence supporting the claim that orgmode is more developer-oriented than markdown. It is identical to markdown in ~80% of the formatting directives people widely use. The remaining ~20% are mostly stylistic choices (would you rather hit the # key or the % key). Most of the unique capabilities orgmode offers (e.g. programming language syntax highlighting) are functionally covered by popular markdown extensions available everywhere someone interacting with markdown would work (e.g. Github, Obsidian). This is a religious war, not engineering. Use what works for you.
  - iLemming 9mo ago
    This isn't a "religious war", because similarities of Markdown and Org-mode are only superficial, once you learn more about the differences, you will see what actually makes Org-mode much, much different. - Org's outline is semantic - the nesting IS the data structure. You can collapse/expand, refile, navigate as a tree natively. Markdown treats `#` markers as decoration on top of flat text. - Org drawers, properties, timestamps are integrated. Markdown frontmatter is bolted on. - Org has in-buffer table editing. Markdown tables are write-once text blobs. - Org can execute code blocks and weave results back into the document. Markdown extensions can display code, but they don't integrate execution. - Org can track what links to what, rename headings and update links automatically. Your claim of the "20% stylistic" is just wrong - those feature differences aren't cosmetic - they do change how you use the tool for knowledge work. > If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants Org-mode does have fragmentation - it's just vertical (depth of features) rather than horizontal (incompatible variants) - Org-Roam, Howm, Denote, et al. Org-mode is less "one format" and more "a Lisp-cursed toolkit where everyone assembles their own variant through configuration" The Markdown variants are at least standardized incompatibility - you kinda know what GFM does. With Org, you don't really know what someone's personal setup supports until you try it. If Org-mode had GitHub's reach and people were pushing personal variants of the spec onto the web, you'd absolutely see 20+ "Org-flavored Markdown" projects. The consistency is partly an accident of Org being the domain of power users who configure rather than fork. There's no "causative reason" for why markdown is more popular than Org - the entire argument is just nonsense. Nobody in the right mind (with the proper Org-mode experience) would ever argue "which is better". It's like arguing LaTeX vs. Word - LaTeX is clearly technically superior for certain tasks, even though Word won institutional dominance - but only those who have very little exposure to LaTeX would argue that "Word's popularity proves it's better designed...", or something.

Derbasti 9mo ago

Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things. Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't. That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative. I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.

stackghost 9mo ago
>I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. Me too. I went to Jekyll and I thought I'd miss org but it turns out I don't. Plus I still get a slow lisp-like language (ruby) just like elisp. Org is a neat idea but nothing supports it. You can get a jupyter-like experience with src blocks but have fun sharing it with anyone unless you only interact with other emacs users. Markdown is merely acceptable, IMHO, but everything supports it, so it's the clear choice in my book.
- WhatIsDukkha 9mo ago
  Its completely trivial to export orgmode to markdown either as a process or just whenever you copy to the clipboard. Completely trivial isn't a big barrier to interoperation.
  - stackghost 9mo ago
    Sure but each "completely trivial" step adds complexity to the overall process, which makes it brittle. I'd rather just write in markdown than have to spend hours upon hours reading the awful emacs docs. I have a thousand things to do and no time. Org might be better, but it's not better enough.

cyrialize 9mo ago

I've been using Org Mode for organizing my life in plain text for the past 10 years now. Beorg on iOS [0] makes it great. I've also started using things like org-ql [1] and org-super-agenda [2] to make me even more productive. I also have a daily log org file I use at work. It helps me keep track of what I need to do and what I've done. It makes yearly reviews easier as well! [0]: https://www.beorgapp.com/ https://www.beorgapp.com/ [1]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql [2]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

tconfrey 9mo ago
Hi @cyrialize , Hopefully this is an acceptable level of self-promotion. It sounds like my browser extension, BrainTool might be useful in your workflow. It's kindof a bookmark/tab management tool. It syncs to a .org file and allows you to do things like mark tabs as a TODO, which you can then track in org-agenda etc. There's some brief descriptions and videos here: https://braintool.org/2025/09/16/Browser-Workflows-with-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2025/09/16/Browser-Workflows-with-Brai...
- cyrialize 9mo ago
  Oh wow this looks really awesome! I'll have to check it out. I unfortunately primarily use Firefox, but still this is great. I've manually tried to keep track of bookmarks via org, but of course I'll always forget to update it.
kleinishere 9mo ago
I’ve looked into a log/journal date tree approach with my various activities across the day (meeting notes, independent work notes, etc) under the date. But then I prefer being able to look through headings that anchor on context first, then dates second (/eventually). Does your daily log link to other parts of one org file, or other org files? I’ve asked LLMs their opinions. But curious for yours! Also thinking about trying denote. The filenames begin with dates, then use tags/keywords to keep the thread on recurring topics.

otikik 9mo ago

It would get more adoption if it wasn’t tied to the waist to emacs. Markdown doesn’t require Vim.

justinhj 9mo ago
There are attempts to extract it but I'm not sure any are successful. org mode is so tightly intertwined with Emacs features. For example tables can have calculations where the expressions are implemented in emacs lisp and can use emacs calc functions org babel, which allows execution of code in blocks on the page and communication between them requires Emacs's comint (command interpreter) which would need to be ported to whatever application "displays" the text. Folding and unfolding headlines requires the exact same display features that emacs has. In general it seems the link is so tightly bound that it would be as well to simply embed Emacs in an application rather than extract org mode from it.
KarlVoit 9mo ago
Orgdown doesn't require Emacs either: https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool... Tadaaaa! Furthermore: Markdown requires a magic crystal ball to tell which Markdown flavor it actually is and how to process it for machines. Read the article. Markdown would get more things done if it wasn't tied to the waist to chaos. ;-)
- otikik 9mo ago
  I’m not attacking your thing. I’m not contesting that people have written articles about emacs-less org mode in the past. But they have simply not caught on
  - KarlVoit 9mo ago
    My thing? ;-) My things are pretty much safe because I usually do risk analysis before I'm using new tools according to https://karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-choices/ https://karl-voit.at/2021/01/18/tool-choices/ The purpose of the article is to make it a bit more transparent for people using Markdown-based tools that they still have some lock-in effects in place - depending how they are using one of the MD variants. You're certainly right about the low level of popularity of orgdown. However, this was not the main purpose of the article and I made it very clear that there are many LMLs out there that do not come with the downsides of MD mentioned in the article. So even when you never ever touch org-mode or orgdown, this article is highly relevant to MD users. From that perspective, it's quite irrelevant if orgdown has caught on even though there are plenty of applications outside of Emacs that are able to use that syntax: https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...

justinhj 9mo ago

I love writing blog posts with org mode. I wrote a blog post about blog posting in org mode. https://justinhj.github.io/2020/03/09/how-to-blog-with-org-mode.html https://justinhj.github.io/2020/03/09/how-to-blog-with-org-m... I wrote some code that exports html to a Jekyll static site, but really it works with anything that expects html.

dctoedt 9mo ago

For me, org-mode's big advantage over Markdown is org-mode's macro capability. For years I've been using emacs and org-mode to develop my online course book; each semester I export the then-current draft in HTML to post on the Web. I use lots of macros to expand text, evaluate emacs lisp expressions, etc. Example: In an upcoming revision, I'm wrestling with what to call the book's model contract clauses, so {{{NOUN-C}}} expands to "Clause" or "Rule" or "Plan" or "Protocol" depending on my current vacillation state. Other macros include {{{NOUN-C}}} as components. Example: At the top of the HTML page there's a date stamp as a macro that evaluates an emacs lisp expression. I'm not posting a link here because the HN effect might bust out my (paid) usage limits at my host, site44.com. That's a great hosting site, by the way, with terrific support by one of its two people (founders, I'd guess). It automatically syncs a dedicated folder I maintain on Dropbox, so all I have to do is save changes to that folder and seconds later the change shows up at the online version.

bitwize 9mo ago

But what's really gonna bake your noodle is the revelation that Emacs is one of the most reasonable ways to edit text.

ggm 9mo ago

Given pandoc, as well as Emacs export tools if you stick to a minimum, you generally can move between a lot of formats freely. If I live in org mode for work tracking, I can also be in README.md trivially.

franga2000 9mo ago

The whole "markdown isn't standardised" point is just bullshit. Any place that supports markdown will support the basics and some places having extra features is a good thing! The only thing worse than not having a feature you need in some app is not having that feature in any app. And the differences that exist between implementations are there for a reason. Do you think chat apps would let you have headings or footnotes or whatever if they used org mode syntax? No, they don't want to give you those formatting options, so if they used org mode instead of Markdown, they'd just rip it out of there too. And now you have the same problem.

KarlVoit 9mo ago

Author of the article here: It hurts me to read through the comments. One part of the people who commented obviously didn't read the article they're commenting on. And another part of the commenters does mix up Org-mode, the Elisp implementation within Emacs, with orgdown, the lightweight syntax which is actually the topic of this article. This part of the discussion is totally missing the whole point of my article: practical issues related to Markdown; choosing any other LML which doesn't come with those downsides. Orgdown was just one example of many which I wanted to mention because it is one of the least known alternatives outside the Emacs bubble. I extended the article accordingly and also answered to a comment that came via email. HTH