Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

abdullahkhalids

Last month, after about 10 years, I decided to write a small package for emacs [1]. I decided to use chatgpt to help me do it, as I had completely forgotten common functions and what not. While, it got the syntax always right, it kept hallucinating function names, or was completely wrong about function arguments.

Quite annoying, because all I was asking for it was to move the point around or search backward or forward for specific strings. Eventually, I had to reference stackoverflow and rewrite most of what chatgpt produced to get something working. Some of these resources would have been quite useful last month.

The package itself is a markdown-notebook minor mode. If you trying to write a readme for your github python package, the mode allows you to add codeblocks, execute them and put the results just below them in the document. Works well for text right now, but need to figure out how to make it put images.

[1] https://gist.github.com/abdullahkhalids/83055b1abbd2cdf2416a...

You might like Org Mode

https://orgmode.org/

I use org mode quite a bit.

But github readmes should ideally be in markdown, and it makes no sense to write in org-mode and export to markdown.

I’m sure you know that GitHub handles README.org files too. What’s the downside of using org for readmes?

> What’s the downside of using org for readmes?

Popularity.

That's it. orgmode format was around long before Markdown, then all of a sudden Markdown got pushed hard for some reason.

> orgmode format was around long before Markdown

That's not really true. org-mode (2003) and markdown (2004) only have a year between them. Markdown was pushed more broadly (versus org-mode) because it was not tied to a specific implementation in a specific editor and was just for marking up text whereas org-mode was meant to tie in with more of emacs' other packages and capabilities.

If you weren't already using emacs, you likely wouldn't have known of org-mode in the late '00s. Markdown had already been incorporated into a lot of static blogging systems and forum comment systems by then with many independent implementations. Additionally, org-mode wasn't made a default element of emacs until 2006, two years after markdown was publicly documented.

All that said, I still prefer org-mode and use it for my own readmes outside of actual work where I stick to markdown.

I have yet to have a collaborator who uses emacs, let alone org mode. Best to provide people open source stuff in the format they are familiar with. I wouldn't want learning the org format be an impediment to contributing to a project.

Pandoc has by far the best org->md conversion.

Have you found a good way to drive pandoc from emacs?

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