Comment by juped

6 years ago

Org is a way better naturalistic markup format, with way better tooling, but it's hampered by being emacs-only and having weird devotees who like to sell it as some kind of task planning tool when really it's a naturalistic markup format.

I've never liked emacs, but I keep it around for Org, which I use most often as a LaTeX generator without all the ceremony of actual LaTeX.

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juped

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lmilcin  6 years ago

I also love org but it is no replacement for Markdown exactly for the reason you mentioned. Emacs as a way of life is a no go for most developers.

I may love Emacs but I want to be able to edit my project with something else if need be (IntelliJ IDEA?) and I definitely don't want to force my users to any particular IDE. Making my project only really accessible to Emacs users just to be able to work with document files seems like a very good idea if I want to discourage them from ever looking at it.

  • globular-toast  6 years ago

    There's nothing at all tying the org-mode format to emacs. It's a plain text format which any editor supports and syntax highlighting would be just as simple as for markdown.

    • dpbriggs  6 years ago

      In practice I am not sure how true that is. There is a phenomenal ecosystem around org-mode that will require an amazing amount of work to recreate in other editors.

      I haven't seem other editors get close to the convenience and integration org-mode has in emacs. For example, org-babel lets me dynamically generate entire sections of a README on github[0]:

          #+BEGIN_SRC python :results output raw :format org :exports results
    ... elided python to generate org mode ...
    #+END_SRC

      Not to mention org-capture, org-agenda, or the various org-export-* functions. The deep hackiness of emacs lets this stuff just work naturally. And the quality of org-export is just amazing, especially when compared to say pandoc. I have done all of my university assignments in org-mode, augmenting with latex where required, and it just works. Same concept with my website, I have a tiny function to turn org-mode buffers into live html rendering experience with basic elisp:

          (defun make-blogging-mode ()
      (interactive)
      (toggle-word-wrap)
      (toggle-truncate-lines)
      (flycheck-mode)
      (flycheck-vale-toggle-enabled)
      (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'org-mode-export-hook)
      )

      And a file hook (at the top of the org mode file so it runs automatically for me)

          # -*- find-file-hook: make-blogging-mode -*-

      This isn't just a simple, context-free grammar that any other editor can emulate. It's an entire ecosystem that needs to be translated, and many have tried and failed.

      Edit: Forgot to mention tables and the spreadsheet feature. Another hurdle a text editor will need to implement to recreate the experience

      [0] https://github.com/dpbriggs/redis-oxide/blob/master/README.o...

    • lmilcin  6 years ago

      For starters, org-mode is only fantastic as long as you use it with the org-mode. While there are some basic integrations with other editors none provide what is so fantastic about org-mode, which is extensibility with your own code.

      Once you leave Emacs you are left with pretty standard file format with bunch of peculiarities that don't make much sense outside of their intended use.