Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

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Org-mode is a beast. A fantastic beast, much like Emacs itself. You dive in, but there's always more to learn. Some things may be for you and some things don't. Everyone should give it a try.

A little known fact, even among most org-users: Github can render org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo, thus you can write your README files as org-files.

Shameless example: https://github.com/josteink/csharp-mode/blob/master/README.o...

This alone was enough to make me drop Markdown as my go-to format for semi-formatted text-files.

A subtle killer feature here is org-babel. You can embed proper code in your text-files and have your editor (at least Emacs) understand them as such. Which makes it excellent for writing technical documentation for projects where code is involved.

>Github can render org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo

They also support ASCIIDoc, ReST, MediaWiki markup, Creole, etc.

See: https://github.com/github/markup

I really wish that other services would be like this. You enter text in a few popular markup languages and not one specific language.

> A little known fact, even among most org-users: Github can render > org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo, thus you can > write your README files as org-files.

I recently stumbled across the tidbit. The Ruby library Github uses to generate it though isn't 100% though. If you want to use org-mode properties for style customization of html output your SOL.

Original project:

https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby

  Currently, you cannot do much to customize the conversion. The
  supplied textile conversion is optimized for extracting “content”
  from the orgfile as opposed to “metadata.”

It does say that developement has moved to:

https://github.com/wallyqs/org-ruby

Which has no such note, but doesn't say anything about supporting it.

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