Comment by kaushalmodi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaushalmodi | Hacker News Reader

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> your markup without the blank lines and

That's because I like that and only I am using that.

If it's a matter of team collaboration, certain ground rules can be set to resolve that.. like use blank lines after headings. You might be surprised but there's actually an Org mode setting in Emacs which can be configured to set how many blank lines to auto-insert after each heading -- I set that to zero.

> the fact that headings look like bullets to me make it harder to follow.

If you start using Org, it won't look like that. In fact, I use hyphens for list items in Markdown too as they work there too, so there is not too much context switching as I switch between Org and Markdown. I went through a lot of that as I was developing the ox-hugo package :)

Also in Org, lines starting with "# " are comments, which intuitively are comments in many languages. Markdown doesn't have comment syntax! I need to do stuff like below to fake a comment in Markdown:

    [//]: # "comment"

So the "headings look like bullets issue" will wear off once you start using Org, and then you wish Markdown also did the same :)

> Markdown doesn't have comment syntax!

Sure it does, . This is also what Emacs will automatically use if you add-file-local-variable in a Markdown file, so I don't know why you're using that weird format.

There's a stronger argument to made that org-mode doesn't really have comments. As far as I can tell syntax-ppss never gives me non-nil for them. Sure, a line like "# foo" appears in a comment face, but so does a line like "#+ASDF:" or "#+BEGIN_SRC" (but not a line like "#+TITLE:"). So whether something is a "comment" depends on its contents, which means it's syntax, never really a comment.

> Sure it does, . This is also what Emacs will automatically use if you add-file-local-variable in a Markdown file, so I don't know why you're using that weird format.

I was thinking of native comment syntax in Markdown, which is absent. But you are right, HTML comments, like anything else HTML work fine in Markdown. So you have a valid point.

> There's a stronger argument to made that org-mode doesn't really have comments. As far as I can tell syntax-ppss never gives me non-nil for them.

Hmm, I had never checked that. That's good to know. M-x comment-dwim works though. This might be good to report as Emacs bug.

> Sure, a line like "# foo" appears in a comment face,

That's a proper comment as per Org spec. Those lines are completely ignored by Org, for any parsing or for any exporting business.

> but so does a line like "#+ASDF:" or "#+BEGIN_SRC" (but not a line like "#+TITLE:").

Because those are not comments. It's not an official term but I think of those as pseudo-comments. The "#+.." lines while looking like comments have a special meaning to Org. The meaning of those can also be exporter backend dependent.

> So whether something is a "comment" depends on its contents, which means it's syntax, never really a comment.

Yes only for #+ comments.

`#+...` is called "affiliated keyword" in the spec[1]. Those are distinct from comments, which are required to have a whitespace character after the hash sign[2].

[1]: http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Affiliated_keywo...

[2]: http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Comments

> M-x comment-dwim works though.

This is because org overrides massive amounts of Emacs default functions - in this case, in org-setup-comments-handling. org-mode doesn't really use syntax tables normally. Similar problems occur with strings. They are known issues, and unlikely to be fixed.

The problem is you don't need to convince me. I could easily switch to org mode. It's the generic public that concerns me. You have to admit most people use stars as bullets. Even languages like wiki do. But also things like onenote and office things.

I'm not sure where this got off the track, but is anyone trying to convince the general public to use org? ox-hugo is an org package and org is centrally dependent on emacs. If you use emacs org, this is useful, if you don't it's probably not.

But if you do use emacs and org, there's absolutely no question that org is more readable than markdown. It's a bit like comparing Word to plaintext, they are just not the same tool.

EDIT: I guess the article could be interpreted as convincing you to switch to org so that's probably what you mean, but I sort of read it as "if you use emacs, org is better than markdown", which I can't really argue with. But if emacs is a non-starter for some people, I find pandoc is very useful for moving documents back and forth.

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