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Comment by jasperry | Hacker News Reader

The value of Org outside Emacs would be the same value that Markdown has, if it had wider adoption. Voit's post makes a strong argument for Org syntax's ability to serve for all the things Markdown currently does, while being more consistent and concise than Markdown, and so he pushes for it to be more widely adopted. We know that in tech, the better format doesn't always win at first, or ever, but we can advocate!

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org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much. it's also a todo app. It also lets you run code like a python notebook. it can show you your tasks in a calendar.

I've used "org-mode" todo apps on android, but people complain they can't really use it because it doesn't implement everything.

The advantage of the core markdown syntax is that you know it works everywhere and it works everywhere because it's small and easy to implement.

> org-mode is just much more complicated to implement though and just contains so much.

So just implement the features it has in common with Markdown and add the rest as and when people ask for them.

For me, org-mode syntax is just that much more intuitive than Markdown. I sometimes feel that when devs invent something (Markdown, YAML, etc), they really should do 5 minutes of research before inventing their thing.

Markdown should have used all the org-mode syntax for the the features they wanted.

Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC. So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I don’t like many parts of markdown either (like the syntax for bold), but those were also IIRC already being parsed by some IRC clients before Markdown was specified.

> Markdown was based on the "syntax" already being used informally in emails and on IRC.

News to me :-/

> So the author did do some searching to define the syntax.

I recall using tin/rtin in 1995, and people used the org mode syntax for italics, underline and bold (not that it made any difference). Same with plain-text email (I used elm, then pine, then mutt). Same with IRC clients - convention was the org mode syntax, not the markdown we have today.

The very first time I saw '**' for bold was in setext, circa 2004. People weren't actually using setext though; they were using *some text*, _some text_ and /some text/.

Here is a post from January 2001 documenting what the existing conventions were: https://everything2.com/title/conventions+for+plain+text

Here is the jargon file (maintained in the 90s by Guy Steele and ESR) that documented the the markup/typography conventions of the time: https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

In short, no, I don't believe that the authors did any research. I think what happened is that they saw something like setext, though "great idea, lets run with that!", and did so.

I think the implementation challenge is the reasoning behind https://karl-voit.at/2021/11/27/orgdown/ So you can say "my org-mode parser implements orgdown level 1" meaning it has the basics. I think it sounds like a pretty good idea, though it's kind of a third party effort – it'd be better if there were some officially sanctioned compatibility level standard from the orgmode authors.

Fair enough. We can argue about the betterness of org but even if so, its enough better enough to push our something as popular as Markdown. The real item of value is org mode.

Exactly. We should all speak/write Esperanto.

In the meantime, I'll advocate for evolving Markdown, specifically GFM.

I do use a custom keyboard layout, but that doesn't have to interoperate with anything/anyone.

Edit: I have a similar unpopular opinion: we should use functional languages and immutable datastructures. At least we some data of movement in that direction with the patterns being adopted by other languages and codebases.

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