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Comment by tconfrey | Hacker News Reader

This is very exciting.

IMO the Tools For Thought (#TFT) ecosystem is crying out for a standard interchange format to break down the silos. Org-mode could be that format. It's not just an outliner format, it's the best markup[1] and supports pretty much everything you need for journaling/task-management/project-management etc.

What's been missing thus far is a single canonical definition that everyone can build on (beyond the org-mode source code). I'd love to see this be the reference implementation of Karl Voits Orgdown proposal [2]. (BTW there was a recent relevant discussion here [3])

[1] https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

[2] https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30879327

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Imo the problem with Org-mode is that it "afterloads" all the complexity into the :PROPERTIES: drawers. Those quickly transform into unreadable hideous beasts of metadata that _require_ you to use Emacs. Every plugin developer likes to create their own set of properties, which directly leads to the problem of "multiple Markdown flavours". Extensibility is not always good.

Thats a fair point. But I'd argue that as long as there's a large enough core of agreed upon functionality having app-specific data packed away and carried for free (as plain text) is not a bad thing.

My app, for example, sticks a couple of useful pieces of data in properties but when it creates a TODO item or adds a [[link]] or *heading that semantic meaning is available to any other outliner or task management app using the same backing store.

I guess the argument is that org-mode encompasses a large enough set of core components that its the best place to standardize what can be standard in this PKM/Productivity/TFT space.

All good points. As a daily user of Org mode, I couldn’t agree more.

Hence, we are working on building a parser that also acts as a canonical definition here: https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser

Thanks @preek. I mentioned you guys in [3] above. BTW I'm actually using this parser: https://github.com/orgapp/orgajs for my product (https://braintool.org), so there are other choices. I guess the key thing is a single well defined grammar.

Is GDrive syncing working in Organice these days? I've wanted to demonstrate interop with BrainTool (which syncs to GDrive files) but last I checked there was some bug.

I agree! I'm the creator of phonetonote [1], which tries to integrate with different tools for thought. I just started a `tft-interop` repo [2] with similar goals. We're just getting started thinking through how to make the TFT structures (edn mostly) more interoperable. I'm not personally an org-mode user, but agree it could be a good format to parse these trees in and out of. I've mostly been thinking about OPML so far. Feel free to hop into the discussions where we're sorting through these ideas — https://github.com/phonetonote/tft-interop/discussions/2

[1] https://phonetonote.com [2] https://github.com/phonetonote/tft-interop/

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