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Comment by sp33der89 | Hacker News Reader

I hope org-mode gets more popular outside of Emacs. I know all the words already about how org-mode is great because of Emacs, but the way you can do plaintext outlining, with great support for TODO's, in org-mode is fantastic. It retains a lot of readability, and that isn't Emacs specific: there are things that make org-mode great as-is!

A small todo application for mobile that uses org-mode as the database doesn't need to parse fancy org-babel stuff, except maybe that org-mode itself can be hard to parse.

Personally I'm hopeful that org-mode gets some more love outside of Emacs, so here's a list of interesting org-mode projects that aren't pandoc or Emacs related:

- https://github.com/RWejlgaard/org - https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ - https://github.com/haxscramper/haxorg - github.com/cnglen/windancer - https://braintool.org/

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That won't change until top-notch, simple (i.e., without 100 transient dependencies) org parsing and formatting libraries for a few key languages (go, javascript / typescript, and python; maybe also C++ and java) become available.

Which is sad because org-mode seems far more versatile than markdown, except for a couple of ergonomic features (e.g., ``` vs #+BEGIN_SRC, and * [x] task vs * DONE task).

Even libraries to parse and format a subset of org-mode would be good enablers.

The list of parsers is here: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tools/index.html

I think it gets away with being more verbose because those two aren't spelled "#+BEGIN_SRC" and "DONE", they're "C-c , q" and "C-c t d" (from memory). I think unless you really commit to learning a decent subset of what org-mode provides the ergonomics are always going to seem a little clumsy. I've always found emacs shortcuts hard to learn, and because of that I've never quite got my use of org-mode over the activation hump to really stick for the long term. Every time I leave it and come back to it I have to relearn a lot of it from scratch because there doesn't seem to be any sort of intuitive framework I can hang it all off.

I made my own macro* to encapsulate the currently selected text in SOURCE \END_SOURCE tags. Now you're telling me there was a keyboard shortcut for that?

What else I don't know about emacs?

*It was my first macro/function and while creating it I've learned that 1. It wasn't that hard and 2. With help of an LLM you can program emacs a little even without deep knowledge of elisp. Though LLMs suggest very unreadable elisp code and you have to rewrite everything.

There is orgzly on Android :

- https://github.com/orgzly-revived/orgzly-android-revived

I sort of bounce off of org over and over because I find it very unreadable. Compared to Markdown (I know Markdown isn't quite the same thing), org feels very crusty and noisy.

This totally depends on how you set up your org face attributes. I keep using Org because, for me, it's far more readable than Markdown.

Also, it's always a tree. The three operations, like folding, traversal,. etc, are essential for me, and not available in Markdown.

Fortunately, GitHub understands README.org files.

Emacs folds and unfolds Markdown just like Org since about 29.0 at least I think.

How does it save the state?

Ask Jason Blevins:

https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/

The answer, as provided by Gemini based on this article, is: It doesn’t. And that disqualifies it from real world use to me, sadly.

I see, thanks. I reset Org mode state as well on file open, so I never noticed (it never bothered me) that Markdown state is not stored.

Have a peaceful Sabbath.

While org mode can do almost anything, it is foremost an outliner, not a markup language like markdown. Using org-mode in place of Markdown is like using MS Word for coding, so no wonder

I think you are right. My real issue is that I don't have an "outliner" brain. I've never really understood why people make outlines or even, really, take notes.

Org's utility to me is then the making and keeping track of todos. But markdown can do that without much trouble.

I actually pandoced my Markdown files to Org mode a few years ago because Org mode is easier to read in plain text editors. I especially like the use of dashes for lists. However, even in Emacs Org mode, I still use `backtick` fences in inline code.

org-mode would need an Obsidian-level polished application to become a thing. This is not that simple, I guess...

BTW obsidian borrowed a few ideas from org-mode, like clickable checkboxes, creating ad-hoc daily notes, etc.

Logseq is probably the closest we had, but it doesn’t quite reach the Obsidian polish and is now moving off of plain text files (somewhat sadly but understandably).

But the fancy org-babel stuff is 90% of the reason I use org -- and that's only on Emacs as far as I know.

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