Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2018)
karl-voit.at
karl-voit.at
... goes on to name one tool (pandoc) that parses Org-Mode (and also parses Markdown. I would in fact guess pandoc is used much more often for the latter than the former).
> Org-Mode Has Excellent Tool Support
> this is not an article about Emacs
... goes on to describe the "tool support" in Emacs. Sorry, but the paragraph title here really implies we're going to be talking about a range of tools, not just Emacs.
And then to conclude:
> With this blog article I wanted to point out the usefulness of Org-mode even when you are not using Emacs as an writing tool.
Can anyone point me to where exactly in the article the author has done this?
Org-Mode is great if you use Emacs. Try installing the Org-Mode addon in your non-Emacs IDE of choice, and you'll hit the same "partially implemented/not-yet-supported/etc." issues you would using an obscure markdown parser. In this regard, Markdown is much more "standardised" than Org-Mode—a standard exists for both, but the level of adherance to that standard in terms of the total number of parsers out there is undoubtedly higher for Markdown.
The beginning workflow was VS Code, and I certainly appreciate your note about the partially implemented featureset of most orgmode non-Emacs clients.
I then discovered Orgzly (http://www.orgzly.com/) which I hooked up to VS Code using Drop Box free. Orgzly is fantastic and supports a lot more of orgmode than most clients. (edited to add: orgzly is an android app)
Now, however, I've dropped VS Code in favour of Emacs running on either Windows 10 or OS X terminals. There's a decent cheat sheet (https://orgmode.org/orgcard.pdf) that I refer to a lot.
So my advice would be to give orgmode a try using Orgzly at first, then get a simple instance of Emacs going and use the cheat sheet to make things easier to learn and dip into. I think the push to try to do things outside of Emacs is throwing away the orgmode original codebase baby with the Emacs bathwater. I know Emacs is considered scarier even than vim, but for my simple use case it works well. It was even fairly easy to get the org-jira plugin working to pull my Jira tickets into TODO items.
I've tried on VS Code and also given up (on Org, not on vscode, which was far more central to my workflow than Org was).
I'd tried SyncOrg on Android, but had not heard of Orgzly. I see from your link it's on FDroid—just retried doing a search on FDroid for 'org-mode' to see what else is out there that I missed, and nothing comes up (neither SyncOrg not Orgzly). FDroid really need to fix their search, and/or makes of those clients really need to fix their metadata; not sure which.
I may give Orgzly a go, but tbh without decent desktop client (short of switching to Emacs, which I shan't be doing), I'm not sure how worthwhile it will be. I may try some pandoc automation...
I only use Emacs for org-mode stuff so far. For pretty much anything else I'm using VS Code.
If you're interested, the ~/.emacs file I use is at https://gist.github.com/anthonyclarka2/28543be1a5cbebd0d3d96...
Along with SyncThing and Emacs in laptop, that's my preferred organising system for the last 6 months or so.
However, Orgzly can sync with local directories on your Android device, so could Syncthing work via that route?
I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more, because:
* It supports a variety of timestamps, which is critical for implementing task management workflows. In fact, I think Org has more users for it's time management features than for anything else.
* It supports tables with spreadsheet-like formulas. So you can include data in your documents and perform computations. This opens the door to accounting, billing and part lists when doing project management, etc.
* It extends Emacs outline-mode, so it has a really consistent hierarchical structure, properties, tags and whatnot. Very important in a number of use cases.
* It supports literate programming, which I don't use, but can reasonably replace Jupyter-like notebooks.
* It defines a number of link types, which can be extended. Out of the box, it does support DOI for example. Which is important for many people doing reference management.
If you're going to say that, you should list some of them (with corrections).
If I did, I'd be eager to correct them. What were they?
> I love Markdown, but Org does a lot more
I agree. Org is great, as I said above.
I don't think I criticise Org anywhere in my comment, I was purely questioning the points in the article about non-Emacs use.
I mainly intended to say I think Org is much more standardized than Markdown because there is at least a unique reference implementation and a unique reference document describing the format. Whereas for Markdown, you do have many slightly different implementations and attempts at standardization, despite Markdown being an order of magnitude simpler.
In places like GitLab, people are taking advantage of this by running Emacs in batch mode inside a container to effectively use the reference implementation for export-to-other-formats purposes.
It's not an ideal situation, though. And I hope someone creates a truly independent library. There is a Ruby parser employed by GitHub and GitLab which covers a decent subset of Org. Furthermore, Orgzly and vim-orgmode are pretty much closer to implementing a much bigger subset of Org.
At this point, Markdown does have a real standard, CommonMark. GitHub-Flavored Markdown was modified to become an extension to CommonMark (it's literally just a few extra features on top of CommonMark at this point). There are of course non-CommonMark-based implementations still (such as MultiMarkdown) but at this point anyone adding Markdown support to a project should be using CommonMark or GFM.
As a side-note: As a regular emacs and org-mode user, not a fan of the date format and lack of flexibility in picking repeating schedules.
I haven't used repeaters that much, but I was under the impression that they were very, very flexible. At least much more flexible than a typical todo app. What don't you like about them?
For reference, here's some documentation about them:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Repeated-tasks.html
https://orgmode.org/manual/Timestamps.html#Timestamps
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Time...
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...
I agree that it could be better, but I'd be surprised if it was something that was typically expressible in other programs. So the fact that it's doable at all seems great, and does indicate that it's flexible.
Since you said it lacked flexibility, I was wondering if you had an example of something that was not expressible in Emacs org-mode but that was expressible elsewhere.
> Moreover, diary-float sexp expressions are most definitely not helping the argument of usability outside emacs.
Well, it's not elisp, is it? It's just sexps. It may as well be JSON, but more concise.
Just to clarify, I am not criticizing org-mode for not implementing in comparison to others. The lack of flexibility I suggest is the date format itself, which does not even allow specifying 2nd Thursday of the month for example. diary-float allows it, but is not intuitive.
I intend to write an interactive scheduling tool for org-mode when I can spare the time. Like regex-builder, but for dates.
&%%(let ((dayname (calendar-day-of-week date))
(day (cadr date)))
(or (and (= day 21) (memq dayname '(1 2 3 4 5)))
(and (memq day '(19 20)) (= dayname 5)))
) Pay check deposited
For your example of 2nd Thursday from every month, instead of:
%%(dairy-float t 4 2)
&%%(let ((day-of-week (calendar-day-name date))
(day (cadr date)))
(and (= day-of-week "Thursday")
(> day 7)
(<= day 14)))
&%%(let ((day-of-week (calendar-day-name date))
(day (cadr date)))
(and (= day-of-week "Thursday")
(or (and (> day 7) (<= day 14))
(and (> day 21) (<= day 28)))))
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...
But I wish we had something like Remind [1] where you can define events based on e.g. Easter dates, skip recurring events if they fall into a holiday or move them according to a rule.
In particular, I hate I have to change all bank holidays every year. Remind got this right. There's some added complexity, though.
A nice thing about Org is the pragmatic way it deals with recurring events. You clone them and adjust at will, manually. So you can deal with really odd ways of re-scheduling meetings.
[0] https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/determining-easter-date...
However, I'd prefer if all these things were merged into mainline.
The word standardization gets abused a lot in our industry. Usually it implies something that 1) has a non ambiguous specification, 2) is widely used. 3) is endorsed by some standards body or cross industry organization or simply so widely used that it effectively is a standard 4) has multiple independent implementations (tools, parsers, websiters, etc.)
Org-mode has a specification (https://orgmode.org/); is at this point in time not widely used; has not been endorsed or proposed to a standards body like e.g. w3c, ietf, etc.; has a very limited amount of implementations. Declaring it a standard is meaningless until that is fixed.
The Github flavor of markdown has a decent specification (https://github.github.com/gfm/), many implementations of e.g. parsers for different languages, many websites/tools/etc. using it. It's not at this point a formal standard but the previous makes it more or less a de-facto industry standard that is widely used, with a reference OSS implementation and many other parsers aiming to be compatible.
If you are implementing markdown support, you could do worse than pick this flavor. Several other flavors are equally well specified, have similarly good tool support and industry endorsement, and might very well be considered standards in their own right.
Of course, like with Json, there's a long tail of not so great parsers that have implementation specific bugs/quirks/omissions/features, etc.
Just a minor note on this: Org-mode was created in 2003 (the syntax a bit earlier) and Markdown in 2004, so I think this was a case of parallel evolution, each unaware of the other, not intentional deviation.
Edit: And the use cases were different. Org was designed as a syntax for an outliner, and Markdown was designed as a syntax for prose. Both are plain text and optimized for readability in their pre-processed form, but maybe it's the fact that they are so similar that's remarkable.
He did not include reference to org-mode, so he probably did not know of it at the time. (Although maybe Aaron Swartz was familiar with org-mode, and provided cross-pollination?)
Most likely as you mentioned, md and org both evolved independently from similar ancestors
People are not uniform, they don't all like the same music, books etc. so why should this not be true for tools?
The small slice of Org-mode demonstrated in this article might look like just a Markdown clone, but within Emacs you can do things like a Jupypter notebook with Org-Babel, which GitHub renders statically. Granted, it’s possible to do these things without Emacs (or a watered down plugin for another editor).
Only at the very basic feature set of Org mode. But Org also allows for properties, and tags, and timestamps, and deadlines, etc. etc.
Org-mode's initial release was in 2003 (I can't find a specific month); Markdown's was in March 2004. So Org-mode predates Markdown by about a year. Personally, as someone who is not an Emacs user, I heard of Markdown years before I ever heard of Org-mode.
This article actually doesn't give it justice, because Org-Mode is more than an alternative to Markdown because it specifies formatting for time-based tasks, so you can specify deadlines and you can also track the time you work on those tasks. You can use Org-Mode for task management in a way that other formats are not suitable.
Examples of tooling:
1. GitHub can render Org-Mode files (in gists, etc)
2. you can find task management tools for iPhone / Android that can work with Org-Mode, one example being: https://beorgapp.com/
3. in a text editor all you really need is syntax highlighting, but yes, you can find plugins for many editors, not as evolved as Emacs's, but acceptable, e.g. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/itemdetails?itemName=to...
Speaking of apps like no. 2, show me TODO apps that synchronize text files to Dropbox, using your format of choice that's not Org-Mode.
Is tooling really a reason for why you're not using Org-Mode, or is it because you're too conservative to try it?
I honestly believe that org-mode alone is reason enough to keep emacs installed on your system. It's full-featured enough that you could ignore everything else Emacs does and still find it a very powerful application.
> the level of adherance to that standard in terms of the total number of parsers out there is undoubtedly higher for Markdown.
Sure, there is less tooling because it is used less, but that's not an argument against embracing it. The more people who use it, the more parsers will get written for it.
Last I looked into it (mainly with interest for vim), few if any parsers/tooling exist for it outside of emacs; as I recall, people claimed that it apparently has sufficient (undocumented/poorly specified) quirks in the emacs implementation that 100% reproduction is difficult; similar to implementing vim-mode for editor plugins
In which case, its only as standardized as the one implementation; which is exactly how standardized markdown started with (the perl implementation)
If there were good (and fast!) js, c, python, etc libraries to fully support parsing org-mode to AST and HTML, only then would it be a viable solution for markup.
> there's no good way of converting <markup language> to html except by running <preferred converter>. So for each article, getting a html representation requires firing up <preferred converter>. That's insane.
But if you are content with a less featured variation of the markup language (but still more featureful than Markdown), you can get that for JavaScript too: https://xiaoxinghu.github.io/orgajs/syntax
not to mention the security hazards of running emacs with any user input from a website.
Second, "firing" up Emacs sounds odd to Org Mode's target audience. :) We already have Emacs open! (I typed this comment in Emacs).
I don't know how hard it is to make a nice looking website in Org Mode, but to make bland websites for academics (like this schmuck's page: https://www.matem.unam.mx/~omar/), I think Org Mode and org-publish are great. And probably it's not harder to make a nice website with org-publish than with anything else: the trick is being willing to learn CSS. :)
Of course the canonical format for pandoc is markdown.
Kulfon is my own project, so take it with a grain of salt. I've decided to focus on Org Mode as I also believe this format doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It doesn't mean Markdown is bad, au contraire, it is almost perfect. In Org Mode, for instance, I still cannot get used to the source code blocks. It is, however, good to have a choice.
The Org Mode support in Kulfon is not perfect yet, but good enough for most situations. It is based on a JavaScript plugin by Xiaoxing Hu called orgajs [2]. You can use it directly in your project.
One of the motivations for building a SSG with Org Mode was Org Brain [3]. I have a plenty of interconnected notes that I would like to publish on my website « as-is ». This would be rather difficult to do using Markdown format.
[1]: https://kulfon.org/ [2]: https://github.com/xiaoxinghu/orgajs [3]: https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain
A partial snippet of the code that handles new posts:
https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/c401f12d50d4e1d4f94492e3d0f...
What's happening is that I take the HTML generated by Emacs Org Mode exporter, deserialize it to DOM, select a block corresponding to contents (to cut out superfluous stuff I don't need), and then run a bunch of tree-walkers that massages the DOM until it becomes something I can wrap with my site's scaffolding and dump into a file. It's really ugly, but gets the job done.
IIRC last time I tried this (long ago) there were a number of gaps in things like org-mode tables.
At the limiting case, the (common or uncommon) elisp extensions (e.g. org-babel) will likely never be processed by third-party tools.
The one problem I have with pandoc is that when using word export, it loses the table and figure numbers. Mind you, at least I only have to put those in outside emacs :)
To me that's got the same drawbacks as "not standardized". If not all of the existing tools support the standard then there are several de facto standards.
So far, I've not seen any major issues.
Maybe Ruby's implementation is best for now since github is using it.
For many years (even now), we have several competing implementations of HTML, yet the HTML document is the dominant presentational document format (and UI layout language). It hasn't done anything to hurt adoption.
The fact that Markdown does have a common subset of features, and that Markdown is widely interoperable with a vast amount of products is why it wins. As far as I can tell Org-Mode markup is used within Emacs and really nowhere else.
You say Markdown has a common set of features, but what is that common set? There's no standard, and I find myself surprisingly frequently struggle with figuring out what's the correct way in a particular markdown engine to do what I need to do.
An example is that in Reddit's markdown; this text:
```
if (true) {
console.log("hi");
}
```
Markdown engines are also wildly inconsistent about when they treat something as a link, and whether they require a blank line between a paragraph and code blocks or lists.
They seem to mostly agree about how explicit links and bold and emphasis and headings work though, so if that's your consistent common set of features, I suppose you're right.
Org-mode on the other hand is basically an emacs thing that has never been seen in the wild outside maybe as a pandoc input? Which is coincidentally another tool I almost never actually use by itself. And I have literally no idea how ota reference implementation works or on which languages could I embed it and how.
I'm pretty sure my experience isn't that rare too.
There are a couple of vim plugins. I don't know whether they're any good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/comments/4ms4z0/org_mode_which_...
Commonmark didn't really accomplish much in terms of standardization. The problem is that they didn't take seriously comments that they didn't support everything they needed to support in order for it to be a standard. The most prominent example is support for math, which is extremely common. That wouldn't be so bad if there were support to escape processing, but they weren't willing to support that either.
The response is to tell anyone that they need to look for an implementation with the proper extensions for equations or whatever you might need that's not currently supported. There's not much to be gained from having a standard if it doesn't ensure document compatibility among competing implementations. Commonmark is nothing but yet another version of markdown.
There is CommonMark specification: https://commonmark.org.
This argument is valid, but…
> An example is that in Reddit's markdown; this text: [snipped] will all end up as inline code, with all the newlines and extra whitespace stripped out.
This does not validate the argument. Implementations defer to John Gruber’s Markdown Syntax Documentation.[1] It is insufficient to be used as a standard (hence your argument being valid), but does (in some cases) provide a common subset of features compatible everywhere. The “fenced” code block is not included in Gruber’s original Markdown, but became so popular due to GitHub that people come to expect it. It is still not part of “Standard Markdown” though.
* GFM = Github Flavoured Markdown, even if Gitlab have very cheekily taken on the same initialism for their (in fairness, highly compatible) flavour.
some markdown text
<div>
some
**inline**
text
</div>
some more markdown text
> On redesign, a slightly-edited version of CommonMark. On old reddit, it's still snudown.
(and mobile apps have their own markdown)
> New Reddit note: Indented code blocks are the only form of code block that works on Old Reddit. Use them for compatibility
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/markdown#wiki_code_blocks_and_in...
maybe in a few years there is going to be syntax highlighting, one can hope :) (slack doesn't have it either, but even discord has it...)
HTML and JS have succeeded in spite of their clunkiness, not because of it.
Markdown on the other hand has no such lock-in, mainly because it usually gets transpiled into HTML or other formats. Replacing it is a lot easier and can be done incrementally without client support.
The 'number of implementations' issue with org-mode is that there are almost no implementations outside of Emacs. Standardization by obscurity is not a very compelling virtue, and the opportunity for widespread adoption has passed.
- original org: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hnorg/text/org/emacs.o...
- markdown: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hnorg/text/markdown/em...
- html: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hnorg/text/html/emacs....
- pdf: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hnorg/application/pdf/...
- more fancy plain text: https://demo.filestash.app/api/export/hnorg/text/plain/emacs...
there's more builtin and with plugin you can say extend the github markdown to cope with jekyll, hugo, ...etc
pandoc -f org -t markdown <file>They are extremely generic: every Scribble syntax is prefixed `@`, every POD construct is either `letter<...>` or `=word`. And yet they are surprisingly unobstructive and readable enough. Compare with BBCode, which is also pretty generic but too annoying.
They are readily extensible and need no special one-off syntaxes for most things. Yes, using asterisks or underscores for emphasis is handy, but how about strike-throughs? Underlines? Non-emphasis italics (e.g. species name)? Language tags? Abbreviations? Do they nest? Do they work in any context? Why not adding some harmless options to the existing constructs? Syntax extensibility should be one of the foremost concerns of markup language design and they got it right.
Edit: I should stress that these concerns are only valid for writings. For casual comments, less is better (ideally no-follow links and verbatim texts should suffice).
Markdown's raison d'être is, "if you follow these conventions when doing ASCII art formatting, the my program can transform this to HTML or whatever other format".
The conventions being mostly the ones used in the pre-HTML email era, like underlining headings with a bunch of ======.
Orgmode is completely different to that. Orgmode is an "outliner/GTD" at heart, but this aspect has been buried under a ton of features.
Then if you want "prawfishunal qvalitat" advanced formatting, typesetting and layout control what you really want is something like Latex. Yet another whole different thing.
Org has just much larger scope than Md. The whole feature set of Markdown covers a tiny fraction of Org features.
NOTE: my use case is writing high-quality, good looking technical and user manual-like documentation.
Org-the-format is very close semantically to ReST - most of Org constructs have a direct equivalent in ReST, and vice versa - rather than to Markdown. And Org-the-system is very similar to Sphinx (the documentation/article/paper creation tool in Python) or Scribble. They are functionally equivalent - headless Emacs in Docker with Org/Babel and Sphinx - and it's unfortunately very hard to justify choosing the former over the latter. I know - I just tried this past half a year and failed, even though I could count on a lot of goodwill from my co-workers :(
(I'm ignoring the agenda, timelog, notes, spreadsheet, and all the kitchen sinks which also come with Org because they tend to be of private use, and I'm focusing on professional context)
The situation changes drastically, of course, if you do use Emacs. The Emacs' UI for Org, which is yet another thing from Org-the-format and Org-the-(headless)-executable-exporting-to-html/pdf, is incredibly powerful. Examples of features: storing, pasting and inserting and following links, footnotes, images. Structural modification of the document without hassle (no more missing text after reordering a list!). Ability to edit all code and examples in their corresponding modes (with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, etc.) Ability to run a single chosen code block with a key-press, inserting or updating (or not) the results into document. Support for editing tables - rearranging columns and rows. Latex, PlantUML, and dozens of other languages and tools integration... These are all very nice, very powerful features - and that's on top on whatever conveniences you have already configured in your Emacs, too.
Unfortunately, without the UI, Org is no more useful than Sphinx. On the other hand, no one's going to switch to another editor just to edit the docs, nor should they be forced to.
I like Org. I store my notes and some todo lists in it, I enjoy Babel (support for IPython/Jupyter notebook style development but polyglot), I maintain some parts of my blog in Org (long and unwieldy otherwise lists nested to a few levels). I cannot, however, see any reason to introduce Org as a tool for my team at work, unless they all see the light and come over to Emacs side :)
PS. a bit off-topic but I need to vent a bit: the API of Org is just awful! Functions for traversing the structure of the document are both in outline and org modes, and it's hard to know which is where and why. There are myriads of ways to get the current element, none of which is simple. A lot of the processing is still based on text search and substitution, instead of AST. It's not trivial to go from source to AST, either. I found at least 2 bugs in macro expansion code. I wanted to syntax-highlight the results of a code block (JSON was returned) and I had to hack around in header/keyword parsing for this. To be honest - some of my enthusiasm vanished after the experience :(
The main point of markdown is that it is supposed to look like a normal & readable text document in its own right. The transformation to html isn't absolutely necessary for readability.
I've been using Scribble for embedded API docs for years,[1] and the formatted result looks great, and is very powerful and extensible (Scribble is actually a better LaTeX), but it's not nearly as readable in code as it could be.
I think I actually preferred my earlier three-comment-character-Texinfo format I had before, and I even wrote a converter to Scribble for it (so that it would look idiomatic), except Texinfo format just couldn't handle Racket types.
Now that I've put Racket on hold while I Rust a bit, in the interests of job-hunting, I'm happy to see Rust is using Markdown (coincidentally, also with the three-comment-character prefix).
[1] Here's one formatted example, everything coming from the code files and package metadata, no separate documentation files: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/roomba/
@Foo; is a standalone empty node named Foo
@Foo[aa] has a "aa" attribute without a value
@Foo[bb=cc] has a "bb" attribute with "cc" value
@Foo[dd="hello, world",ee] has "dd" attribute with "hello, world" value and "ee" attribute without value
@Foo{blah} has a "blah" text child
@Foo{blah @Bar;} has "blah" and Bar children
@Foo Bar shortcut for @Foo{Bar}
@Foo{!{...}!} has ... as unprocessed content
In my processor the tree is passed to a script that does the actual handling by going through the nodes, children, etc and creating the output text (HTML or whatever) - the processor itself has no knowledge of specific node names, any meaning lies in the scripts.
My biggest issue with the above though is that i do not like editing markup by hand, so at some point i want to replace all the above with a GUI tool that does the same job but in a more graphical way without the need for (visible to the user) markup syntax (so the above example would be edited as just text but with the "nice", "example" and "code" bits having representational styling).
I made an Emacs mode for it: https://www.neilvandyke.org/scribble-emacs/
I prefer html5, where you can leave tags open as if there's no tomorrow.
The ideal case is TeX, where paragraphs are separated by a blank line.
As for TeX, i personally dislike markup languages where whitespace is treated in a special way since this is source code, which often needs some style of its own and sometimes that depends on context.
To me seeing where a paragraph - or any other "long" element - begins and ends can be helpful and if anything, i consider the lack of syntax for this in my markup as a negative (but i couldn't come up with a clean and unambiguous syntax for adding an optional "closing" bit). I compensate for that using comments (which look like @# Blah until the end of line), but it is a workaround.
And also FWIW i prefer to have the markup map to the underlying tree of nodes clearly than introduce "magic" that in some cases can make things harder even for writers.
Keep in mind though that this is for long(ish) documents, like a large tutorial, guide, manual, etc not short comments like this one here. For anything that is around the size of a common blog post or shorter, something more adhoc like Markdown is probably better.
just to nitpick: except for APL, white space is treated in a special way in all programming languages to separate tokens :)
Using it to separate text (words and paragraphs) makes perfect sense in this context.
But this is obviously a stylistic preference as to me that sounds too much trouble for no gain at all - which is basically your response above :-P.
But as i wrote in my original message, i'm not a big fan of these plaintext formats and i'd rather work using a "WYSIWYM" editor that uses these nodes behind the scenes instead of having the user write the markup by hand. But that is obviously much harder to implement (and if the tool handles the nodes for you the syntax doesn't matter at all anyway). Still, to me that is the ideal:-).
you will pry plain text editors from my cold, dead hands!
The problem is that you have to take care that there is no > in the inline code, and if there is, you have to switch to C<< ... >>. With Markdown's `...`, this happened far less often to me.
[1] Annoyingly enough, macOS Sierra and later maps a backquote to a Won sign in Korean keyboard layouts.
I'm writing my college notes in it and couldn't be happier. The dev is very responsive on mailing lists and would gladly help you out if you have some trouble initially. There is a pretty thorough getting started guide on the linked page. There's a few blogs written in Pollen and even a few books (Ever heard about Flatland? Or Practical Typography?).
I'm still looking (Scribble seems anything but lightweight!). Perlpod probably looks perfect but I have to see more.
Is there a markup that can do numbered lists?
Regarding section titles, I think the theory is it makes it easier to stick new header levels into a document.
(For those who aren't familiar with RST: If it sees underlines like ====, ----, ^^^^ or ~~~~~, it decides what the header levels are based on the order in which it sees them.)
In practice, it means a typo makes it completely ignore your header, you have to learn a set of acceptable characters for headers, and there's no way to start a document with anything less than shouty H1.
Nice idea, though.
> Is there a markup that can do numbered lists?
Correctly and usably? NOPE.
1. first item
2. second
3. and so on
Markdown does parse that, but it seems superfluous to me tbh.
Write in any text editor, and a tiny JS boilerplate turns it into nicely-rendered HTML.
I've been looking for and at solutions for using org-mode as the markup language for a static site generator, and none of the ones I find do what I want. org-mode has a builtin exporter that can build whole websites, but it is very barebones. The only real solution I know of is Hakyll with Pandoc, which is what I'm playing with right now.
I wish we had something like CommonMark for org-mode, but the overlap of people who use org-mode and don't use Emacs is probably extremely small, so it's not like there will be competing implementations outside of Emacs.
I do exactly this via Pelican. I wrote a Pelican plugin to handle org files. Behind the scenes, it merely uses pandoc to convert to rst, and Pelican handles rst quite well.
No major issues so far. Email me if you want the code.
Note that my solution assumes one org file per post. I've been working on an equivalent of ox-hugo[1] for Pelican, and I can share that as well. It's still in alpha (I break compatibility all the time) - but it works well enough that I'm using it as my primary way of writing posts. Having all your posts in one org file is fantastic.
It's still the same concept - it extracts a subtree into an org file, and uses pandoc to convert to rst.
i.e. If your answer to anyone's problem using Org is "what prevents you from using Emacs", then that ain't standardisation.
My comment was written with the intention of seeing if I could help with the specific problem the GP mentioned, since it seemed like the GP had overlooked a possible solution. I should have been more clear about that, sorry.
When I created the current iteration of my website[1], I started out just adding some custom export formatting advice to the default ox functions. I couldn't resist add some additional functionality, though, and it takes refreshingly little work: There's one function that iterates through the Org source files and uses the built-in Org functions to query the files for tags, title, date, and so on. The result is memoised in a list, and then various other functions iterate through that list to generate index page, tag listing, and so on.
I started working on ox-hugo exactly to have an Org export solution that exports the content + meta-data. If you look at the screenshots on the ox-hugo homepage (linked in BeetleB's comment), you'll see what I mean.
Ask me anything about it.
What Markdown has going for it is a much wider acceptance as a simple, straightforward way to work with text. Especially on modern devices, users with little or no coding background are successfully being lured into (superior!) plaintext workflows by apps with a great UI, and appear to take to it. iA Writer [A] and Bear [B] are two prominent examples of such apps, and I can't see why they would be any worse (or less popular) apps had they instead opted for org-mode behind the scenes.
This is what org-mode needs to gain widespread adoption, and I'm hoping we're on our way there.
[0] https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web [1] https://beorgapp.com/ [2] http://www.orgzly.com/ [A] https://ia.net/writer [B] https://bear.app/
I have been working on a Python way to import/export Orgmode files to/from an SQLite database that you can view and query in a native GUI (using Toga[0]). I was writing an Org-mode importing package for Python (to gain access to my Orgzly files and learn Python) until I found Orgnode[1]. I have the GUI table working, but I need to connect Orgnode to it and build an exporting system. You can follow this project at [2].
[0]: https://toga.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [1]: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/orgnode.html [2]: https://gitlab.com/bthall/orcbench
Without Emacs, org-mode is just weird markdown.
The way it can quickly link between different types of unrelated content just doesn't make sense outside Emacs.
So, are you saying that the title of the article is bogus? Or that emacs is the only reasonable editor?
Given the options, I think that a decent argument can be made that emacs is the best editor, and that it's unreasonable to use anything that the best — so yeah, one might argue that emacs is the only reasonable editor.
I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but I wouldn't instinctively disagree.
I don't think most Emacs users could match a good VIM user in text editing speed, but then Emacs can do many other tasks that are hard to replicate in VIM, while being a more than good enough editor.
It is not so much which editor is better, rather what are the user's expectations.
To me this is obvious and has been probably been said a 1000 times before, but sometimes when reading threads about text editors, you would not think so.
Emacs takes an everything and the kitchen sink approach and org-mode embraces that.
That is the entire point. If I can only use it inside emacs then I will only use it inside emacs.
It's created by emacs users, for emacs users, it should absolutely mention that word everywhere and stress its origins, it's already widely adopted and who really cares if somebody who is so superficial that he rejects a superior solution because it originated in a text editor he doesn't like doesn't use it?
Indeed, and most of them don't nowadays!
> It's created by emacs users, for emacs users, it should absolutely mention that word everywhere and stress its origins
Of course, when you are explaining the history of org-mode you can mention it. Or when you are explaining how to org-mode with emacs. But to promote org-mode as a generic markup language (which I think is a very good idea), any mention of emacs, even indirect, should be best omitted.
> who really cares if somebody who is so superficial that he rejects a superior solution because it originated in a text editor he doesn't like doesn't use it?
I love emacs and I like to use it, no idea who are you taking about. Or was it sarcasm?
Not that org-mode's any less for it. I'm no longer a daily user, but I was, for quite some time, to organization a particularly chaotic episode of my work life.
But most of that isn't possible without Emacs.
As a markup format I wish it was more widely used. The promise of org-mode is that text is the best format for storing your data in. However to properly read more than the surface markup language of org-mode requires a significant amount of software. And very few editors or software packages exist outside of emacs work with it.
And so lacking any other features of org-mode it's markup language isn't any more impressive or useful than any other and is more of a matter of preference. It would be nice if more software packages supported the org-mode markup syntax but I wouldn't say it's the most "reasonable," even given the arguments in this article.
People complain a bit too much about productivity and context switching.
I recently came to the same conclusion as the article but was dismayed by the performance of the popular Vim plugin (and wasn't ready to switch to emacs), so I wrote a very, very minimal implementation which is enough to get me headings, folding, tables (including formula solving, the syntax for which is currently left as an exercise for the reader), unordered lists, dates, and various other things.
It's very much a work in progress (in particular, the syntax files expect a graphical Vim) but it's definitely improved my note-taking. Requires Python 3 support.
Some pet peeves:
I really don't ever get the argument about Markdown URLS. Being able to do both [](url) vs [][ref] is awesome (the latter I liberally use when writing long form docs). If one finds it so annoying one would make the mistake like three times and then it'd be burned into one's brain due to selective pressure. Or just use [][ref] style (which is more readable anyway since you don't have the URL right in the middle of a sentence).
Also, very personal thing but my brain seems to hate /italics/ as it branch predicts into parsing that as a regex.
What drives me nuts though is all the variants and ad hoc syntaxes like JIRA's or this very board's, which sit right in the uncanny valley of nonsense.
Gak, yeah, I empathize. JIRA was a pain point for me too.
I take comprehensive notes using org-mode (including all of my false turns, dead ends and "explore this later"s) and when I need to paste something into a ticket I export via ox-jira.el and copy/paste what I need. It works much better than the author's modest README might lead you to believe, and of course it's hackable.
To date, I haven't seen a flavor of Markdown that has a comment feature. I use it extensively to hide all my notes that don't have a place in the final exported document people will read.
bunch of bindings - https://github.com/asciidoc , etc.
Also Oreilly publishing officially supports Asciidoc for Atlas publishing - http://docs.atlas.oreilly.com/writing_in_asciidoc.html
I use it to make flashcards (csv format for Anki) out of my notes. The front side is the hierarchy of a headline to its parents, and the back is the text below the headline.
e.g.,
* Python3
** I/O
*** modes
- 'r' open for reading (default)
- 'w' open for writing, truncating the file first
- 'x' open for exclusive creation, failing if the file already exists
- 'a' open for writing, appending to the end of the file if it exists
- 'b' binary mode
- 't' text mode (default)
- '+' open a disk file for updating (reading and writing)
-------------- --------------
| Python3 | - 'r' ... |
| :: IO | . |
| :: modes | . |
| | . |
-------------- --------------
However I would say that there are much better markup languages out there. (Or better yet, don't use a markup language at all and use richer formats. We're not in the PDP11 era anymore.) It's good if you need version control though.
(Broken on Org 9.x - not sure if they fixed it - you may need to use 8.x).
I am skeptical of that.
The whole point of an abbreviated mark-up is to RENDER that mark-up into something else. The "many" people who use org-mode outside of emacs are just a subset of pandoc commandline users (and perhaps some other tool which I am not even aware of). I guess it depends on what one considers to be "many"?
* Org is a mode for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, and project planning with a fast and effective plain-text markup language. It also is an authoring system with unique support for literate programming and reproducible research.*
Whereas the introduction to Markdown from its original author begins simply,
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
These are both lightweight markup languages, sure, but they're designed for different domains. What makes Org-mode interesting isn't ultimately its markup language; look at all the comments here talking about tasks and tags and such. What makes it interesting is its implementation. Markdown, conversely, was explicitly intended as an HTML preprocessor. You can do anything in Markdown that you can do in HTML for the simple reason that if you can't do it in Markdown, you can literally use HTML. That's not what Org-mode is for.
I think the thesis of this article is basically "Org-mode's specific choices with respect to markup syntax are better than Markdown's." And, well, fine; I'm not entirely sure I agree, but I'm not sure it really matters. What does matter to me is that Markdown (a) works very well for what I want in practice and (b) works everywhere I want it to. If I was one of the folks who lived in Emacs, the chances are Org-mode would handily hit both of those points for me. But I'm not. And as lucideer noted in his comment, just because it's possible to use (a subset of) Org-mode's markup outside Emacs doesn't mean it offers any particular advantage over, well, Markdown.
But adopting trumps perfection, hence, GFM is probably the most reasonable choice for new applications today.
Let's be totally clear about this: If Org-Mode were actually popular, it too would have twelve variants. It is not popular.
about that, just found some random online editor and entered this:
https://i.imgur.com/Mcyi3kS.png
not what I'd call intuitive. maybe is that particular editor implementation? but then I'd have an issue with the other half of the post, where he talks down markdown dialects.
"Only if you use EMacs, as Org-Mode is impossible to implement outside of EMacs".
Source: tried once as someone who never used org-mode or emacs. Did not go well.
But I can assign keywords and unique id to sections, include sections from another file, generate indexes and sitemaps in fully customizable manners, incorporate other programming environments. What markup languages can do that?
Org-Mode syntax is an interface to a powerful writing/authoring environment. To dismiss it as a `markup language' is not a good way to advocate its adoption. Something similar can be said to ways people appreciate the power of Emacs.
I do kind of wish we only had one markdown flavour. Maybe why we only have one org mode is because of its lack of ubiquitousness? If it had an electron windows version would it be the same?
The commensurate note is, everything here (Bar one) says it's a stalking horse for Emacs
For my personal notes I now just use vim and a custom syntax file to give color to special names and headings. I've used markdown before but it seemed like different tools treated the language slightly different.
if exists("b:current_syntax")
finish
endif
syn match diaryHashtag "\w\@<!#[A-Za-z]\+"
syn match diaryInlineCode "`[^`]\+`"
syn match diaryLineMarker "^[ \t]*\%([0-9]\+\.\|[*-]\)\S\@!"
syn match diaryInlineMarker "=>\|\S\@<!(\?\%(i\{1,3}\|iv\|vi\{0,3}\|ix\|x\))\S\@!"
syn match diaryInlineDate "\<\%(today\|yesterday\|tomorrow\|\%(\%(next\|last\)\s\)\=\%(mon\|tue\|wed\|thu\|fri\|sat\|sun\)\|20\d\d-\d\d\%(-\d\d\)\=\)"
syn match diaryInlineTime "\<\%(\d\d\=:\d\d\|morning\|afternoon\|night\)"
hi default link diaryHashtag String
hi default link diaryInlineCode Delimiter
hi default link diaryLineMarker Statement
hi default link diaryInlineMarker Statement
hi default link diaryInlineDate Comment
hi default link diaryInlineTime Comment
let b:current_syntax = 'diary'
I've since switched over to org-mode though, I find that the agenda integration and a couple of org-journal plugins make for easy task management. I'd really like an alternative that lets me handle this on mobile, so far I've tried termux and the github edit file interface, and neither are as satisfactory.
The lack of standardisation is probably the best argument, but I suspect that is mostly not a problem for Org mode simply because barely anyone uses it. If it were as popular as Markdown you'd find plenty of non-standard extensions and slightly different implementations.
The appealing case for org-mode is consistent syntax. At least that's what it looks like from a distance. Like I said, I haven't tried it.
I would like to minimize my learning curves, so wanted to get a performant blogging service installed on a 2.50$ Vultr instance, and keep using Emacs for blogging with something that includes math typesetting.
org2blog seems to be fit closest to what I am looking for (but I would prefer something other than wordpress if I have a choice).
Reasonable for text...for most text that's skeuomorphic with regards to the printed word (in most senses). But... what is there for that which is beyond? A response to the linked comment mentions TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Anything else? Is it too vast a problem in that we should make due with solutions that cover 90% of use-cases? Ah, but does that limit potential future development as people mold themselves to the constraints placed on them by the tools and what those tools allow?
Just thinking out loud, per usual.
How about tables?
Though I would suggest that one of the strengths of Markdown is the fact that the basics are simple and easy to understand and it leaves more advanced concepts to specific implementations. So there are implementations for everything from code comments (https://www.hackingwithswift.com/example-code/language/how-t...) to Script Writing (https://fountain.io) which have features specific to their respective domains. Markdown itself doesn't have a huge featureset but the sub-markup languages which inherit from it do.
Edit: What I find more confusing about Markdown is actually incomplete implementations like what's used by HN.
* TODO stuff
text <- no text should be here!!
DEADLINE: <date>
You don't have to use or even know of all of org-mode's features in order to use it. You could use a tiny subset of features and still have a valid org-mode file which is as simple as any other markdown format.
In fact, that's exactly how most people use it. But if they want more power, it's there.
What's more likely to be the reason for org-mode's lack of adoption is that most people don't use emacs.
What is the reason why all those lightweight markup languages don't preserve plain text line breaks by default without special formatting?
It would be much easier to use if they did, if I hit enter in plain text it's for a reason
I like BBCode, and that one preserves your line breaks too
> Org-Mode is Standardized
> the very widely used markup language named Markdown has many flavors to choose from
I believe the XKCD about standards applies here.[0]
The problem with Markdown is only real if you treat Markdown as a single language instead of a family of languages. You don't need to support multiple Markdown compilers. Just pick a particular flavor of Markdown to support for your project. I usually go with GitHub's.
Besides, having a standard doesn't stop others from adding unofficial features on top of that standard. If this happens to take off, maybe I'll be using GitHub Flavored Org-Mode in the future.
At least on Hacker News... a Lot of the Polar users mention org-mode as one of the other tools they're using.
Can anybody recommend a good tutorial?
Also, should I learn pure emacs or go the spacemacs route? My background is in vim.
1. Org-Mode
2. Regex Mode
org-mode is just too good not to use. I use it for interview notes, writing documentation for other teams and non-technical staff, my blog, and probably other stuff I can't think of right now.
The part where I heavily disagree with the author of this article is when he says you don't have to use emacs for org-mode. My, personal, belief is you're missing out of some of the power if you opt for Vim + Pandoc. The exporters in emacs support a lot more features (that I do use) than Pandoc does. If you can get away with just Pandoc then great, but I opted for Spacemacs (coming from Vim).
Coming from anywhere else, I'd just start with the emacs tutorial (C-h t) and then move on from there.
I personally think that there's a lot to like about the vi text-manipulation commands, but that spacemacs does a bit too much out of the box. I just use Prelude:-)
(until it isn't)
I'm assuming all of the variations of Markdown that were created were created without knowledge of the original Markdown creator.
Is the OP going to monitor all open source projects and block people from creating an improvement of Org-Mode
There is only one version of Org-Mode, with its own reference implementation, and it's been that way for years.
>I'm assuming all of the variations of Markdown that were created were created without knowledge of the original Markdown creator.
Not so. Daring Fireball was repeatedly asked to participate in advancing, changing, standardizing MD, but chose not to. He was well aware of the variants emerging.
>Is the OP going to monitor all open source projects and block people from creating an improvement of Org-Mode
That's not how reference implementations work. The only thing that matters are variants that get enough traction.
: Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
: This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.
```
Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.
```
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
(format t "Hello world!~&")
#+END_SRC
One, it's consistent with other blocks, like BEGIN_QUOTE, BEGIN_EXAMPLE, BEGIN_VERSE, etc. (n.b. all four have a default shorthand that gets tab-expanded; <s. <q, <e and <v, respectively) , and with arbitrary user-defined blocks like BEGIN_whatever.
Two, while #+BEGIN_SRC may seem only an unnecessarily verbose way of writing ```, things change when the block starts to look like this:
#+NAME: advanced-block
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp :package my-package :var foo=123 :var bar=asdf :noweb yes :exports both :eval never-export
<<preamble>>
(format t "Hello ~A!~&" <<some-other-block(param=3.14)>> )
#+END_SRC
This feature makes Org Mode essentially a kind of better Jupyter, with automatic support for any and all possible language that you can plug into Emacs, simultaneously.
--
[0] -- here, it'll paste the literal contents of #+BEGIN_SRC block with #+NAME: preamble at the beginning, and then paste the results of executing a block with #+NAME: some-other-block, with value 3.14 for its :var param, at the end
#+NAME: advanced-block
#+HEADER: :noweb yes :exports both :eval never-export
#+HEADER: :package my-package :var foo=123 :var bar=asdf
#+BEGIN_SRC lisp
<<preamble>>
(format t "Hello ~A!~&" <<some-other-block(param=3.14)>> )
#+END_SRC
#+BEGIN_SRC sh
#!/bin/sh
echo "foobar"
#+END_SRC
At that point, adding or removing a ':' is not a repetitive task. Then the ':' notation gains an advantage because selected lines can be copied and automatically keep their formatted status.
The very first line after the disclaimer even reads "Please do note that this is not about Emacs".
- Show styling sigils and keep text plain;
- Show styling sigils AND style the text;
- Hide styling sigils and style the text.
In my experience, the middle option really hits the sweet spot.