Orgdown – Using orgmode markup outside Emacs | Hacker News Reader

Orgdown – Using orgmode markup outside Emacs

karl-voit.at

23 pointstconfrey11 comments

The author should have mentioned https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html somewhere in the first paragraph, because he's basically building to that. Also, he says that there's no formal spec for OD1, which seems strange, because that's exactly the problem porting Org-Mode: no formal spec (yet). One would think that this is a step towards it or what?

> Orgdown1 can be summed up with 43 specific features.

What are they? Couldn't find anything but the page with the examples.

Maybe I missed it, but defining a standard involves actually defining it at some point, no? Like have a pdf maybe? I think I have seen more of the logo noise and the story behind it all and why we need the standard and why this and why that /RATHER than the actual standard/.

And well, the logo... I mean, WHY? It has a very specific meaning already, you know? Like of all the unused unicode symbols, that one, srsly?

> The preference for the level Orgdown1 name is:

> Orgdown1 … if you have the room for the long form

> ⧬1 … if you know how to enter UTF-8 characters (see next section)

> O↓1 … of you know how to enter the downward arrrow characters

> OD1 … this is the easiest to type short form

Bruh, would you just make up your mind on one damn thing?

I commend the intent, but I the whole thing begs for a cleanup.

With the rise of privacy-first, plain text tools for PKM I think this is an interesting project by Karl Voit. Seems like there's a growing list of tools supporting org[1], including my own BrainTool[2]

See also some further discussion here[3]

[1] https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...

[2] https://braintoool.org

[3] https://blog.tecosaur.com/tmio/2021-11-30-element.html#org-a...

* https://braintool.org

This looks great, btw.

I have been looking for an open-source replacement for Tabs Outliner[0], which helps me effectively manage tabs when there are hundreds, even over a thousand tabs open. There are surprisingly few options that are as powerful. Tabs Fern[1] is a close approximation, but it's tab trees aren't multi-level, and it can only restore entire windows instead of single-tabs. On Firefox, the most powerful tab manager I've found so far is Session Sync[2]. It doesn't seem to scale as much as Tabs Outliner and has a different mode of interaction, but I've been happy with it thus far.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

[1] https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/

Thanks! I was a Tabs Outliner user myself and the BrainTool Topic Manager is inspired by it. NB BT can import the JSON exported by TO if you want to transfer your stuff.

I like this. Probably because a few years ago I switched to Emacs for a year and loved doing outlines in Org-mode; but everything else was cumbersome and I switched back to what use for most everything else, zim-wiki.

Now I have a specific thing that I'd like to use that org-mode outline flow for and, true story, right now it's looking like it's not going to happen because I don't think I have the time or patience to relearn Emacs; like I'm genuinely surprised at how long it's taking me to get back with it. Very much an "exact opposite of riding a bike." thing.

It's peculiar when a single person writes what they call a "standard": standard is something accepted and agreed to by multiple parties.

Writing a specification for previously only-defined-in-Emacs-code Org formatting is definitely commendable, and hopefully results in more standardisation of org-like apps.

Agreed. I don't quite understand "Orgdown1 < Orgdown2 < … ≪ Org-mode" and how each is defined and verified. But as someone who depends on transacting in org-mode formatted text outside of emacs it seems like a good idea to at least note that they are separate things.

Um. I'm an org user and I'd like pandoc to have better org support, but this really could have stopped after the xkcd 927 post. Why not just roll the web back to HTML3 and call it a day? Or use something latex inspired if you want more generalized markup? Org and markdown both suck for document preparation, since among other things they have no way to make tables with multiline text in the cells. Mediawiki markup does a much better job of that. It is already used in a huge publishing project (wikipedia) and has about everything you could want. That org mode has its own weird markup language is a bug, not a feature.

> tables with multiline text in the cells

Does mediawiki have calculated tables, tags, executable source blocks though?

And, most importantly, just how suitable is it as plaintext, org's killer feature? Cause this doesn't look all that suitable to me: '''''bold & italic'''''.

> Does mediawiki have calculated tables, tags, executable source blocks though?

Mediawiki has categories which are like tags, if I understand what you are asking. I'm fairly sure it can do calculated tables in principle, though I don't know of anyone using them. Basically you can connect table cells and other elements to browser javascript, like Org tables are connected to Emacs Lisp. It's very common in Wikipedia tables to implement sort-on-click. E.g., for a table of countries with populations, you can click on the country name header to sort alphabetically or reverse alphabetically, or on the population header to sort by increasing or decreasing. The sorting is done in the browser so it is near instant, no page reload or anything like that. I haven't seen that done in Org.

Org isn't so great for plaintext use either. I don't know how you'd even do bold and italic. What messes it up for me is usually long url's that are collapsed inside brackets to make inline links. In unrendered form, the lines are unreadably long without annoying horizontal scrolling.

Mediawiki's killer feature of course is in-browser multi-user editing with built-in version control. I do that with Org using emacs and git, but that is far nerdier.

> no way to make tables with multiline text in the cells

"no way" is perhaps too strong. There are some steps involved but it can be done.

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