Comment by babarock
1 day ago
Are you suggesting I should pick the markup format for my private files according to the perceived popularity of another format?
I'm not sure what's your point. Are you telling people who use org-mode that they shouldn't?
If you think you'll ever want to use third-party tools to process that markup, or if some of your private files will transform into public files at some point, then yes, considering popularity makes a lot of sense.
If they're just text files you edit raw that will never interact with anything else but your text editor, then of course popularity doesn't matter at all. But in my experience, my use cases tend to expand over time.
The article even talks about org mode's interoperability, mainly about the fact that pandoc supports it. And then bizarrely ignores the fact that it has much less ecosystem support than Markdown. So this is very much a subject the article itself brings up, and something that therefore also deserves to be critiqued.
OP here. I stuck with orgmode all these years /because/ of the interoperability.
If I'm writing in Org, I can tangle / detangle between other plaintext sources, including source code. As well as export to collaborate.
The proposition is "yes, and", not "either / or".
It's /fine/ to switch to the popular "team" standard and stay there when needed. Several of my workplace documents, including wiki entries start off as local org-mode drafts. Once I'm okay to share, I export to markdown or draft wiki page and solicit comments. After that, if the document is for shared maintenance, I let my org-text alone, and switch to the "team" format.
This is perfectly fine.
That and the many kinds of markdown. I've been bitten enough by having to look up yet another poorly maintained document on how to markdown for /this/ particular app or website or utility, that I'd rather pandoc translate between my (sane, well documented, fully extensible) org text and whatever I need to share with others, than learn edge cases of various markdowns.
Sure, but I think it's safe to say Markdown has more interoperability, no?
Yes you can always use pandoc, but conversion usually brings quirks of its own. And more generally, the less conversion steps you need, the better.
If you just stick to vanilla markup, you don't encounter incompatibilities. The "many kinds of markdown" isn't an issue if you're not using platform-specific extensions in the first place. Which, usually, you're not, unless you need to do something very specific to that application.
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Ahem. When I started with Markdown, I was regularly experiencing all the issues mentioned for years. The most popular format was Word (doc). Perhaps I should have stuck with that?
No? I’m pushing back against advocacy for broader adoption of org mode beyond personal file markup though, which is what I feel like this piece is arguing.
> note that this is not about Emacs at all. This is about Org mode syntax and its advantages even when used outside of Emacs.
One of the advantages of "going with the flow" when you can is that you benefit from numbers. You're a market of one, but by "going with the flow" the total market is huge.
Even if for me personally 185V mains power would be better, I can't buy gear for 185V, none of the electricians around here know how to work with it, the cables and sockets and everything else are defined around the prevailing systems at 220-250V here.
Maybe in my kitchen a 520mm dishwasher would be great, but alas dishwashers you can buy here are 600mm or 450mm ("slimeline") models, so 520mm isn't available.
With my poor hearing 14-bit PCM would be absolutely fine, but Sony's "Compact Disc" used 16-bit so that's what everybody uses and records by default.
If you work with Markdown, there are a lot of existing tools which are ready to use. There are tools for Org Mode, but maybe not as many.
There's definitely a sliding scale here. Refusing to use Twitter because it's full of Nazis is very different from refusing to conform to society's expectation that you wear clothes outside for example. There are people willing to spend most of their lives in jail because they refuse to wear clothes but almost all of us don't think that's a principle we care about enough to prioritise (also some of us get cold).
bro we're talking about text formats for organizational skills not justifying public nudity