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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

Which is funny because it’s really an incomplete spec that originated from a blog post. But it won anyway because both machines and humans can use it with relative ease, which is apparently quite a difficult thing to achieve in a markup language

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It might be my Emacs bias, but I find Org much nicer as a format. For instance, timestamps and todo items make it trivial to use Org as a planner. This would be great to have in applications such as Apple Notes.

I love org-mode, but if I were king, it would accept freakin' back-quotes for monospaced text. Instead, it takes ~tilde~ or =equals=, and I will never remember the difference no matter how many times I look it up.

=string= leads to the text being transcribed verbatim. A good hint is to recall that the equals sign kinda implies verbatim.

Ironic then that [0] (the first hit when I search "emacs org mode tutorial") says:

    You can make words *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~, and, if you must, +strike-through+.

[0]: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org4beginners.html

That seems to be a very old tutorial. It's indeed confusing that they host that on the official site.

The official manual states equals is used for =verbatim= quotes: https://orgmode.org/manual/Emphasis-and-Monospace.html

This is also the primary hangup that's kept me from adopting org-mode for notes, and I instead keep everything in MarkDown, and miss out on all the org-mode organization effects. The differences in link syntax are hard too, but I've got 5-10 years of DokuWiki in my history that make the link syntax more palatable. However, I still prefer MarkDown syntax for links too...

I switch between Markdown and Org Mode a lot, the syntactic differences don't bother me too much, but I guess I like Markdown's a bit more. But what I really miss in Markdown:

1. Collapsible headlines and headline search.

2. Executable source code blocks (for notebook style work).

3. TODO states.

4. Time tracking and clock tables.

5. Table formulas.

6. Inline LaTeX and document generation in general.

Now 1 is just an editor feature, and some of these others could be, too. But I wish Markdown was more powerful, extensible, or less ubiquitous.

What bothers me most about Org Mode is that support is pretty limited outside Emacs. We use it as a wiki replacement at my company, for that integrations into other editors are kinda good enough. But there's some areas like reporting only Emacs users can realistically work on. GitLab (and Forgejo, which we recently switched to) render Org pretty nicely, so it's easy to consume in a browser. But editing is a different story.

So I guess I wish for either a less complex (and thus easier to support) Org, or a more powerful Markdown.

I’ve seen a lot of apps extend markdown to support various additional features. Obsidian, for example, has an extensive number of community plugins which offer a ton of features.

This of course ends up being editor specific, but if org has the same limitation, by being tied to emacs, is it really any different? I think what emacs has going for it in this case is that it’s been around for decades, and we can assume it will continue to be around for decades into the future. The markdown editor de jour may not be.

Yeah, that's my thinking with these tools. I think it needs to be more of a standard.

Either Markdown++ or Org Lite. I'll take either :) I'm not a fan of coupling formats and tools tightly.

I use orgmode's ~tilde = "for code"~ and =equals_for_filenames.txt=, but what do I know.

I also like [Markdown's text first](https://hyperlink.com) then link format much more than [[https://hyperlink.com][Orgmode's link first then text]].

But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:

  - Alternative syntax for _italic_ *italic* and __bold__ **bold** (why?)

    - versus using /italic/ and *bold*. It just feels so right

  - You need to use HTML tags <u>to underline</u>, or <s>strikethrough</s>, or just about anything in Markdown (including line breaks! You need to use the <br> tag)

    - +strikethrough+ is alright, but _underline_ just makes sense

  - Lack of a unified Markdown standard:

    - Diminishes portability (e.g. varying approaches for file meta tags like in Obsidian)

    - Causes different renderings of the same document (e.g. Obsidian vs GitHub)

    - There was a serious standardization effort in 'Standard Markdown', only for the original creator to be a knob about it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/

It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).

Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.

Which is what frustrates me with the invention of Markdown.

A ten minute web search would have revealed it was already a solved problem, instead of splintering and inventing a new 'standard'. But that was somehow too much effort.

I'm sure Gruber was entirely unaware that there existed other markup languages. If only he'd done a quick Google first. Shame. /s

Markdown was never created as a standard, it was created to fit one person's workflow and how they liked to format documents. It just so happened that it's pretty similar to how many others like to format documents.

Forget it, we’ve lost. I was also partial to Textile for tables, and that’s gone nowhere too.

ASCII docs is the nicest for humans of all the ones I’ve experimented with.

And it's readily convertible into high quality manpages. I thought git's were written in troff before stumbling into the actual source:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/refs/heads/master/...

When the original is in markdown, it's somehow always noticeable.

You can have all that and even more with Markdown too, but it comes with the price of "vendor lock-in", as most of those are kinda optional and depending on which markdown-app you are using. On the other side, org-mode has also kind of a vendor lock-in, as there is only one leading and format-defining app, even if there are a handful of clones implementing a subset of its features. Though, at the moment org-mode, has a slight advantage in having a more well-defined and maintained format-definition, while Markdown seems more a chaotic meltingpot of anything goes.. but it seems the community-effect manifests in the long run, and people settle on new features and their syntax. The only thing missing is a proper definition of this, which is supported by everyone. Obsidian seems to have enough weight to pull this at the moment, but we will see.

> ... it’s really an incomplete spec ... . But it won anyway

It's the new classic example of "worse is better".

Other markups may be more well thought out and more complete, but Markdown beats them hands down on usability.

Consider the comparison between MD and RST, for example...

RST disqualifies itself immediately by making inline markup un-nestable, though.

Markdown handles complexity by allowing html to be freely put into the doc. The basics are really easy, and if you need to do something more advanced html exists. Though this can sometimes make readability drop to 0. I ended up doing this for a complex table I wanted in a readme file, and kind of regret it. I have to explain to people on my team how to use preview mode in their editor, or to view it in the repo online. Although that view online does look nice.

I mean it’s the same problem with mermaid but I still use that pretty religiously. Being able to have your README natively render graphs is super useful and most engineers these days have a markdown previewer built in to the software they use eg vscode

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