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Comment by thecsw | Hacker News Reader

Orgmode got me through college, research, and at work, it really is the perfected markup language that can do a lot more than just being a markup language. The extensibility and out of the box export to other formats makes it immediately useful for at least 80% of common tasks.

It has ingrained itself so deeply into my muscle memory that I built out a whole website builder [1] and extended the language to support all kinds of nice QoL things for my website [2].

Something that as the other commenter here noted—I can rely on orgmode for many decades to come.

[1] https://github.com/thecsw/darkness [2] https://sandyuraz.com

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> As of 2025-02, there is no formal Org-mode syntax definition.

is very far away from perfection

> As of 2025-02, there is no formal Org-mode syntax definition.

Confusingly, you seem to have taken this from Karl Voit's website, without referencing having done so?

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

And then taken the sentence out of context. His point is that even though there isn't a formal Org-mode syntax definition, there is an informal one in that all of the Org mode syntax elements are part of the Emacs Org-mode implementation. The latest Org-mode implementation /is/ the spec. This is in comparison with Markdown where there are numerous syntax definitions and no implementation which includes all elements and everything is a mess.

> taken the sentence out of context

> This is in comparison with Markdown

This context is irrelevant, I'm not discussing how bad markdown is, but how great org mode is.

> The latest Org-mode implementation /is/ the spec.

You're just conflating the terms, that's not what a spec is, and having one has benefits that living impls don't have

I have on gripe, that is the mixture between org structure and org document heradings. I know, they are the same, and such a distinction doesn't exist.

You can start a "document" at any place in the org hierachy. I would rather prefer a distintion between these two concepts.

How would the distinction work?

> Orgmode got me through college, research, and at work, it really is the perfected markup language that can do a lot more than just being a markup language. The extensibility and out of the box export to other formats makes it immediately useful for at least 80% of common tasks.

With regards to your 80% claim, do you happen to know an extension that works well with pasting images from clipboard?

Over the years, my professional note taking has become extremely reliant on quickly pasting images (most often screenshots from papers or quick-and-dirty plots I made myself) from clipboard directly into the notes. The friction of doing this in vanilla org-mode is the only reason I'm not doing everything in org-mode.

I use org-download (https://github.com/abo-abo/org-download) for pasting images.

yank-media is built-in https://orgmode.org/manual/Drag-and-Drop-_0026-yank_002dmedi...

orgmode is what helped me write my first self-published novella, without having to worry too much about formatting for print. Apart from the initial configuration, it was pretty much plug and play when going from plain text to something I could upload to KDP.

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