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Comment by taude | Hacker News Reader

Yeup, I would love to have some of the org/agenda operations/views on a regular markdown file. Especially so I could just copy it raw out, and paste into other markdown-centric tools, github md files, etc. for colaborating with others.

Since markdown is becoming so prevalent. Even our product managers are becoming natively conversant with it, I'd just prefer to have as markdown first world.

(don't get me started ranting about how Atlassian and Slack have migrated away from markdown and to proprietary formats....).

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Yes must say I have found myself moving away from org and looking at it as an annoyance wrapping up many excellent features that could be wrapped up in simple elisp function and structures that could then just be encoded in what every way one likes, it seems to me that for example todo lists are actually better as nested lisp lists, And then you can simply render as what ever you like. Of course one might like to serialize back as well but I have often wondered about it.

I definitely think markdown has won (at org was never going to 'win' of course given it's limited scope) and actually is probably what we should just all be using and accept.

That's actually not a bad mindset, especially when lisp can be vibed so easily. I could actually see myself building out my own library that does the things I want over markdown.

- have it look through all md files in a directory, collect all the todos into a main view

- look for items tagged with a date

- support customer tagging, and provide workflow exports for each one...

- behind the scenes git management for files

- etc...

I've been wanting to build a collaborative markdown editor for awhile now, making it so that different front-ends could work with it is an interesting thing to think about....

My thinking was lean into lisp lists rather then the actual rendered format, so that instead of a text buffer (although you could always open up a text buffer that is the lisp list) you have a list that you can use normal elisp functions that is bindable to keys and highly customizable and your only really building fairly simple elisp machinery on top and you can just use an alist (though you could use a plist I think alist's work better for todos) to represent todo's and just use assoc and setf and friends to do your modifications.

Of course one might also want to actually build out todo nodes as CLOS style objects. Only caveat hear is that you would need to decide how the object should be serialized and deserialized and the deserializing has to be more precise.

serializing and deserializing to MD should be easy I think since all we need to do is read in headings and list items into lists with some denotation to the type it was.

Those are just my thoughts on the topic. My thinking has been I have gotten fed up with emacs modes that are good and a lot of effort to write but just end up adding a lot of stuff on top that make it difficult to customize or customize the the standard way and returning to simple lists could be good.

You might just as well require a sqlite db as the persistence layer. Emacs has always been about using plain text files as both data and interface while lisp is the control mechanism.

That’s why you got org files and a handful of lisp functions to turn them into a living documents. Using lists take that aspect away while markdown is just not that good to serve such a role.

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