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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Last time I was looking into org-mode, I ran across an extremely frequent refrain of "there are no 3rd party tools for it, because there is no spec". And then I looked for apps that'd work with it anyway, and came up shockingly short, though some of the most-trivial things generally worked. (orgzly is the one I ended up with. it's pretty good, definitely recommended for anyone doing this)

Has that improved? It seems fine if you do everything from the CLI (or similar), but emacs is a little difficult to use on a phone.

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We're working on a formal grammar and a test suite that can be used to specify expected behavior. See the linked mailing list thread [0] for pointers to some of the interested parties.

0. https://orgmode.org/list/CA+G3_POBAB1QX1Zv8q9sjFh4KHUHVmaNXp...

I just wanted to chime in and mention that the folks who wrote organice[0] also came up with an EBNF grammar[1] for org-mode. Also of tangential interest is that work is actively being done on creating a tree-sitter version[2] of the grammar, although that work is not public (yet).

[0] https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

[1] https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser/blob/master/resources...

[2] https://github.com/kristijanhusak/orgmode.nvim/issues/31#iss...

That is great to hear, thanks! Hopefully it'll bring about a new wave of wider use :)

What sort of third party tools were you after? And when did you have a go?

~3 years ago, and literally anything. I was trying to see if org-mode could serve as a long-term store of info (i.e. decades), so multi-OS and "likely to have other working implementations" or "can re-build by hand if necessary" was critical. Since then I've just settled on a pile of markdown/commonmark files that interlink when desired, and I'm pretty happy with that.

Everything essentially just said "use emacs, that's the only implementation and the only spec". So I tried orgzly for a bit (it's handy), but ultimately decided it's a "hard no" for things with only one impl.

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