Comment by Groxx
1 day ago
AFAICT org-mode has no spec.
Still.
Decades later.
The only spec is a single implementation. Which is probably why approximately nothing else supports it.
CommonMark on the other hand is very widely supported and all of them work great together. I'll stick to CommonMark.
I don't think the lack of spec is holding Org back. Markdown came out in 2004; CommonMark came out in 2014. I think Markdown was already very popular by the time CommonMark came out.
The more obvious reasons are that Markdown was dead simple, unlike Org, and integrated into many popular products, unlike Org.
(Tangent: To be honest, I'm not sure why websites like Reddit opted for Markdown rather than text formatting buttons. It's a good thing, and I'm not complaining, but adding the standard rich text buttons (like the ones Reddit has now) seems like it would've been the more obvious move.)
There’s this https://orgmode.org/worg/org-syntax.html
You can say the same about Python. However, there the forces push in the opposite direction: Even when there are better pythony runtimes that provide almost identical behaviour (but better performance), everybody sticks to CPython.
I tried to use non-CPython just last week for the first time. The first thing I tried to install failed. When I looked up the error… I needed CPython.
In my limited experience, I can only assume people are sticking to CPython because it works. Speed doesn’t mean much if libraries and tools fail to function.
I've seen tons of non-cpython use, so I'm not really sure what claim you're trying to make. Aside from supporting "having a spec allows for many implementations that all work".
Well, the original comment was implying org mode had limited popularity because there is no specification. I'm claiming cpython is way more popular compared to fe pypy because it has no spec. The typical scenario is: people try pypy. it mostly works but because of some weird problem some library is broken and then they give up.
3 replies →
> approximately nothing else supports it.
That's simply not true. There are numerous android and iOS apps that support it. There are implementations for Vim and other editors besides Emacs. GitHub supports it, for example.
I have not found a satisfactory (to me) solution for note-taking in Markdown that is open-source, plain-text, and mobile-friendly with local (non-cloud) sync. (Except for maybe Logseq, which appears to be moving in the direction of using a database.)
There are several such solutions for Org-mode.
I've used those apps and the problem is that they only support a tiny subset of the format, and they can't support any of the features that require the rest of emacs to be present which is a lot of of the value.
If you're okay with the stripped down version that's basically markdown but different and that's fine but I feel like most people fall in love with org mode because it's so powerful once you get it going and all that power comes from emacs. So I get the argument that it's no worse than markdown but you lose so much of the magic.
Creator of Orgro here.
> they only support a tiny subset of the format
I think Orgro's parser[0] is pretty complete at this point. If you can find an Org syntax that Orgro doesn't support, please let me know.
However I should be very clear here:
> they can't support any of the features that require the rest of emacs to be present which is a lot of of the value
This is absolutely true and unlikely to change anytime soon. As I'm sure you know, parsing the syntax correctly is not at all the same as supporting all of the features built on top of the AST.
[0]: https://github.com/amake/org_parser
Both Orgzly-revived and Orgro support a lot more than a tiny subset of the Org format.
Do they support tangling of source code and export to all the formats that Emacs's Org-mode supports? Of course not. But they have all of what I expect for a knowledge-base on my phone, which is a lot more than Markdown was ever intended for.
Codeberg supports Org for READMEs! I think some other Git forge does too, but the name escapes me ;)
So does GitHub since forever BTW
Ah. Well that sure shuts down the "you don't have to use Emacs" argument.
You have to read between the lines a bit, but the post supports it. It's talking about how readable it is, how you don't need tools, etc... and when it gets to tool support, it basically just has "you can use your mouse! you don't need to learn keyboard shortcuts!" to paraphrase, or if you prefer verbatim:
>The basic file open/save, finding help, exiting Emacs stuff is accessible with icons or the menu.
Or earlier:
>In contrast to that, the syntax of Emacs Org-mode as the one and only original form...
Because there is no other real option. Mobile org users overwhelmingly (AFAICT) use Emacs in Termux to edit their files.
This post was originally written in 2017 (tools maybe first in 2019? though it hardly matters). It's still true today.
Orgzly and Orgro can edit Org files on Android. (Orgro, also on iOS, along with other options.)
Both apps support Org-mode's scheduling, robust linking, and search features to some extent, features which don't exist at all in Markdown.
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I don't use emacs in termux; I use organice (though considering switching to orgro). It supports all the features I need on mobile.
Isn't that true of python as well? I would argue that Github's decision to use markdown for formatting, more than any other, is what resulted in its widespread adoption to other use cases. The simple tool to share code ate the world.
I'm continually surprised that Microsoft hasn't completely cornered the market on LLM code generation, given their head start with copilot and ready access to source code on a scale that nobody else really has.
Python has a spec and multiple healthy implementations, and is overwhelmingly more popular than org mode, so I don't really think that's a rebuttal.
Honestly, "no spec" feels like more of a feature than a bug -- or more specifically, "proof of quality."
If it's gotten this far WITHOUT a spec, there's something inherently good going on that lets it keep going.
Would you say the same about markdown?