Comment by 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.

5 comments

globular-toast

loeg 6 years ago

Does any editor other than emacs support it in practice? And does the tooling around it run outside of elisp?

arh68 6 years ago

There is a Sublime Text plug-in [1], but it's been a while since I used it. I think it's in Python, not elisp.
If you're just looking to edit Org files, Emacs is hard to beat. I don't use Org files so much anymore, more OmniFocus & Markdown/Sublime.
[1] https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode
zimpenfish 6 years ago

I'm a ludicrously casual user of orgmode but https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode works for me in conjunction with the beorg iOS app.

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.