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Comment by skookumchuck | Hacker News Reader

    : Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
    : This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.

The trouble with that is you cannot easily copy/paste code to/from it, because you'll need to manually add/subtract the : prefix. Delineating the section with:

    ```
    Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
    This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.
    ```

is much more practical.

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They’re not mentioned in the article, but org-mode does have syntax for source blocks (a little uglier than Commonmark/Github-flavor markdown’s blocks in my opinion, but it does the same thing and works well).

And you can execute that code too with Babel ———> https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

It may seem uglier if you use it first time:

  #+BEGIN_SRC lisp
    (format t "Hello world!~&")
  #+END_SRC

but it has two things going for it.

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

AKA. a named source block (so I can reference it elsewhere) of Lisp executing in selected Lisp package, with org mode variables injected into it, using noweb syntax (literate programming) for injecting other code blocks[0], which when exporting the document to a different format (say, PDF) will export both code and results of its evaluation, but will not automatically evaluate the code.

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

I have a slight preference for

      #+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

(Just wanted to point out that the header format has even more flexibility than what you've shown!)

  #+BEGIN_SRC sh
  #!/bin/sh

  echo "foobar"
  #+END_SRC

That also works in org-mode, and then you get syntax highlighting for the language etc. It can even open that block to edit in a separate buffer with the right major mode loaded for that language.

The command is org-edit-special bound to C-c ' (by default I think). I use this to dump example blocks which I often use to catch terminal output as well as source code editing. Having structured outputs from test/investigation/exploring that you can rearrange and export to use as documentation for the next time/training costs so little time that I get upset when I can't do it.

M-x comment-region

This deserves a little expansion - Org Mode makes the reasonable-in-context assumption that the user is familiar with Emacs.

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.

In any reasonable editor, “manually add/subtract the prefix” is an easy keyboard shortcut.

Except one is not always able to use an editor, and assuming people are always able to do something is a great downfall of many products or standards made by people with specific uses cases in mind who think their experiences are universally applicable.

I thought the writeup was about emacs org-mode. Who is planning to use that in a context where the text editor can’t handle basic features from 40+ years ago?

The write up very specifically mentions it is about org-mode as a general purpose markup language.

The very first line after the disclaimer even reads "Please do note that this is not about Emacs".

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