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Comment by karlicoss | Hacker News Reader

I mean, they have a point. I've adopted Emacs mainly because of org-mode, and things you can achieve with org-mode and Emacs are incredible.

That said, it's just plaintext in regular files on your disk. It can be as complex as you wish. If you use a reasonable subset of org-mode, you can parse it (there are lots of libraries in different programming languages), and then implement any tools you wish :) Not familiar with vim plugins for org-mode specifically, but I've heard Atom support is okay?

As an example: on Android I'm using orgzly [0] to work with my org-mode files. It shares absolutely no code with Emacs, yet it supports 90% of what I need from org-mode.

[0] https://github.com/orgzly/orgzly-android

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Does their point have any substance? As other people have mentioned downthread, org files are plain text and the functionality of org mode does not rely on information stored in any other database.

Looking at the comment that raises the objection [0], they advocate for using plain text files and they use a directory of markdown files. If that is the desire, they can use a directory of org files (plaintext like markdown, just different syntax for / italics / and =verbatim= and such.

Hopefully they're not using any external program to search through those markdown and org files though, else they get forced into an interface to interact with their files.

One of org-mode's advantages is a broad export support, into everything from even-more-simplified plain text to rich HTML, to everything supported by pandoc.

[0]: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/2275/#Comme...

Yep, in that sense it's really not fair at all to compare it against traditional services that lock you in like Evernote/Notion/Roam.

I guess I can sympathise in the sense that I really wish org-mode was more widespread outside of Emacs. It feels like a real barrier for adoption (if you're trying to get into semantic org-mode features, not just merely using it for syntax). But I don't see what we can do about it for now.

I think rather than trying to get org mode outside of emacs, you want to change the mechanics of entering emacs. In my head this looks like a subset of emacs (in the same way you can imagine notepad a subset of word, or contenteditable a subset of codemirror). If there were an emacs-lite application that just surfaced simple org mode functionality and bindings like moving the cursor or paging removed behind a settings wall, I think adoption of emacs would rise due to the lower barrier of entry.

But I think there is something there. I use org-mode, but even though it is "just" text files, there is no specification to implement against, all the cool stuff Emacs can do with org-mode files.

Plaintext has no worth by itself. The pwoer comes from what you use the plaintext for. Org-mode has many tools and functionality build around that plaintext which must be replicated outside of emacs when you wanna move away.

I mean ok, sure, if all you do is maintaining a plaintext-file with a specific syntax and doing everyting else in your head, then the plaintext is good enough, but then you don't need org-mode at all. Then you would be back at the papertrail.

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