Let's Help Org Mode Escape from Emacs

> This effort will fail if 50% of the people who would contribute end up not doing so because they don't have time to learn Rust or Haskell.

Lolwut. Choosing Rust as an implementation language is almost sure to attract lots of very smart people to the project.

It's a great idea that has been haunting me for a long time.

I tried a little org-mode and it turned my idea of taking notes and managing tasks. It's such a cool and effective mode that it shouldn't belong only to Emacs.

I would be happy to help with this idea, but for many years I have changed programming to management and can’t do anything than little pet projects.

Let me start by saying I like the goal and would like to see org mode accessible to everyone, but I do have some thoughts/reservations.

> For the little code I do write, I find having AI assistance (via CoPilot or Cody) to be tremendously helpful. So helpful, in fact, that I now tend to jump into VSCode for actual coding,

Aren't there both copilot and Cody plugins available in emacs?

edit, yes and the Cody one has first-party support:

Cody: https://github.com/sourcegraph/emacs-cody (first party)

copilot: https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el

> Use VSCode for everything. For me, this requires a full-featured org mode implementation. I currently feel stuck in Emacs just because of how great org mode is.

This seems much more difficult than creating plugins you need in emacs and with the downside that customization will be much worse in vscode, especially customization of behavior with things like hooks.

> Letting go of bug-for-bug compatibility with Emacs as a goal. Let's let the quirky behavior die off and move forward with a more cohesive program, even if it looks a little bit different.

If you don't have compatibility, then you aren't really implementing org-mode... you are starting fresh. Perhaps you should take inspiration from commonmark which is a spec for markdown?

Also, there is some existing work in making a spec for org-mode in orgdown:

https://karl-voit.at/2021/11/27/orgdown/

That's okay, but you'll likely annoy org-mode users and developers as documents ending in `.org` start not working the same.

Also there are languages besides Rust and Haskell that have an org parser implementation. For instance one written in Javascript already has a spec as you explain it and is used in production for organice[0]:

> Why is this project useful / Rationale

> Org mode in Emacs is implemented in org-element.el (API documentation). The spec for the Org syntax is written in prose. - https://github.com/200ok-ch/org-parser

> Portable. It should not be difficult to get this integrated into any editor.

This tells me you already have a language in mind such as Lua (can't think of any other easy to integrate languages)? I'd argue that's not very popular either though.

0: https://organice.200ok.ch/