Forgive my ignorance but what makes org mode better than markdown? Whenever I see it demonstrated it seems to be just another way of marking up content in plain text. Is there more to it?
Emacs' better understanding of the structure gives you much better editing; I have chords for operations like "move this item up/down" and "promote/demote this item", plus excellent folding, jumping, and a measure of intellisense-like functionality.
org-babel can do anything that even looks like literate programming. I make regular use of both its notebook functionality (like ipython) and its more traditional features (compile to a documentation part and a code part), and its integration with emacs lets you do things like pop out to edit a code block in its native mode as if it were a little tiny file.
org-agenda and org-todo use the format's support for rich semantic metadata to do anything you could want from a calendar, bug tracker, organizer, note-taker, or list manager. You can tag your items with indexed keywords, arbitrary and even simultaneous to-do workflows, and arbitrary (and I do mean arbitrary, it's emacs and everything can be an elisp snippet) to-do deadlines and recurrences. And all that data isn't just a wash; a wealth of options exist for slicing and dicing your data in any number of ways, high-level overview or detailed statistics.
And on top of all that, you can render org-mode documents to nearly any markup under the sun! I regularly compose documents in org, using all of this power, and export to markdown or html to publish.
I'd almost say that a "mode" for editing org-mode files almost doesn't deserve to be called "org-mode for X" if it doesn't do all the fancy stuff. It'd be like calling telnet a gmail client because you can theoretically negotiate an SSL handshake by hand - yes, but that's not the point. I think that people came into this thread hoping for a vscode extension that does everything that emacs org-mode does, but I don't think that that's something that'll happen, unfortunately, not unless vscode's architectural philosophy is very different from what I expect.
Yes. Org Mode. I.e. the huge, extremely versatile, extensible and powerful (and complicated at times) Emacs package that uses (and defines) this format.
As a way of marking text up, it's not much different from everything else. But combined with org mode, it's probably the most hacker-friendly system for managing todos, events, habits, information, and multiple-format publishing - and all of that in simple plain text.
Personally, I use org mode for blog posts on my new site, for managing my todos, meetings, notes, brainstorms and personal wiki. People also use it as a better (self-hosted!) equivalent of Jupyter notebooks, for literate programming, and plenty of other cool things.
So, TL;DR: it's not the format that's the magic, it's the software around it.
EDIT:
Oh, and tables. Org mode has the single most productive plaintext interface for manipulating tables. It can even work as a basic spreadsheet in a pinch.
You don't have to learn Emacs shortcuts, arrow keys work. For navigating between files use the menubar with a mouse.
File -> Open file -> testtodo.org Type "* Something to do", hit C-c C-t, TODO will appear, hit C-c C-t again, the state will be marked as DONE. Hit C-c C-s, calendar will open you can select a date to schedule. Hit C-c [ to add the file to your agenda (permanently). Hit M-x, type "org-agenda", a menu will apear, hit a, to see all your scheduled items for the week. Hit j to select another date. (C is control key, M is meta key, a.k.a Alt) (C-c means ctrl+c, C-s means ctrl+s, M-x means alt+x, you get the idea)
That's all there is, it takes some getting used to, but a plain text format is really productive. You can easily search between items, transfer your files, customize it all you want. I probably use very of org-mode's capabilities, but it really helped me organize my life.
So no, org-the-file-format doesn't really offer anything to anyone that isn't an org-the-emacs-extension user, but on the other hand it is pretty much feature-equivalent to Markdown/ReStructuredText/etc for most things. Therefore, other than the (significant) switching friction, it would seem to make sense to make more tools speak org-the-file-format in at least a rudimentary way: non-org-the-emacs-extension users don't really lose anything, and org-the-emacs-extension users will gain quite a bit. Github allows a README.org file to be the project front page now, and it's great. It doesn't deal with ALL the features of org, but I can pretty much treat it as an ordinary org file with tasks, and subtasks, and so on, and still have it look relatively nice for someone looking at the repo in a browser.
That's all the VScode thing is trying to do: make org-the-file-format a little bit less painful to use outside Emacs. It's not trying to ape all the features of org-the-emacs-extension, which would be madness.
However, speaking as someone who used to use Notepad++ and Markdown, and now uses Emacs and org-mode, I do think .org is a slightly better markup syntax.
I can't quite put my finger on it. For some reason, Markdown seems great for a page or two, but gets irritating if I try to write longer documents. Possibly it's just a matter of editor support for treating it as a tree and letting you move bits around.
Also, the tables in org-mode are really good.
Another reason I prefer orgmode is the built in exporting functions are second to none. Customize the css and export to html, or my favorite is to export to latex+pdf, because everyone knows latex makes the most beautiful documents.
As an aspiring data scientist (transitioning senior sysadmin), the code snippets function and the ability to evaluate and execute code makes it the ideal data science notebook.
The power of lisp stands on its own.
Org mode task tracking, todo, GTD functions are also very awesome functions just markdown doesn't have.
That's just a few reasons, but orgmode isn't orgmode if it's in visual studio EEE version or whatever the duck new bullshit ms is doing imnsho.
Hah, my observation from early days of using org-mode: LaTeX makes the most beautiful documents, but writing tables in them absolutely sucks. OTOH, org-mode has the most productive interface to plaintext tables that I've ever seen. When I was working on my BSc thesis, I would make tables in org-mode, and then export them as LaTeX to paste into the thesis code.
I fully agree. For Markdown I recently found this nice little utility that I had never heard of before:
(I still do some websites in Jekyll + Markdown. I know that Jekyll can be combined with org-mode, but Markdown is the 'low-entropy and I do not have time' option.)
For example a calendar and a simple spreadsheet.
More obvious nesting structure
It manages many structures for you so you don’t have to type the text
Time tracking
Agenda mode and associated task states and due dates
More than that, it doesn't make sense to think that Markdown is the best solution, or at least the best solution for all use cases. People should continue to try and innovate, at least if they're aiming for something bigger than trivial improvements on the status quo.