Comment by taude
16 hours ago
One of the biggest reason I've stopped using Emacs, and I was a pretty heavy user before was that org-mode files weren't fully native Markdown files, which caused annoying friction when collaborating with others.
It would be interesting for me to have a new markdown-centric org-mode thing. I'd love to vibe lisp to customize my workflows, and I don't totally love Obsidian, which is what I've setup and configured now. I'd prefer to just have the config living in/around init.el/config.el (I used DoomEmacs most recently).
I realize that org/agenda, etc does a ton more than markdown offers, but most of my flow is just around: raw notes to be consumed, check lists, due dates on items, and other "basics" of org-mode.
Any recent Emacsers have similar workflows that are tgenible these days? I'd love to get Emacs back in use in my new antigenic Tmux-centric coding flows, and have it be a first class markdown editor, organizaer, and potentially collaboration.....
Org mode is a coherent whole, and has capabilities far beyond what Markdown can accomplish (Markdown is inherently HTML-based, org-mode is not). Markdown's history is littered with folks trying to augment it in just the right way to bring these sorts of features, which has resulted in a diaspora of flavors, none particularly dominant+powerful (which is to say, no real org-mode competitor has emerged, even though one could have). I've used Markdown and Org-mode for 20 years concurrently, and trying to make Markdown work like org-mode has never been successful for me.
I wrote a bit about this back in 2021, in response to a query on Reddit "Why didn't org-mode just use Markdown?".
https://rpdillon.net/why-doesnt-emacs-org-mode-just-use-mark...
Asciidoc is a nice middle ground between the full suit of tools you get in Orgmode and bare Markdown.
To me Orgmode (after years of using it) feels like .docx. A weird poorly specified format that is only fully editable from one editor. Granted you ran read it from anywhere, but you won't want to edit it from anywhere other than Emacs. That feels like it defeats the point of using markup - which is supposed to be editable/usable from anywhere, even Notepad.
.adoc is usually sufficient (the only part I miss is tangle). Lots of options to specify at the top of a document like the images directory, or the CSS file to use, line SVG on HTML export etc. (which Markdown lacks). But the asciidoc converter runs from the command line or from code ( I write .adocs and convert them in Clojure). So you're less married to your editor.
Ideally there'd be some markup that's specified with a regex of PEGs or something that you could easily make a parse for in any context. I thought djot would be that, but it looks like making a grammar is secondary for them. I hope some day one could navigate to markup file in the browser and they'd automatically render with your own specified CSS.
I love Org-mode and use it for many things - the outline format is great, even for some unexpected cases - Jira tickets, Slack, Reddit and HN threads, etc. But of course, hard to escape Markdown these days, so I burned some tokens to implement this https://github.com/agzam/prisma.el
For example, I just added the ability of seamlessly copy&pasting between two formats (prisma-yank-mode) - if the source was a markdown, and you're pasting it into org - it will convert and vice versa. And if you really need to insert it verbatim - you just call it with C-u arg.
That's a neat trick. I know about org-md for exporting generally to a markdown file but going in/out via buffers is useful.
What is wrong with markdown mode? Is it that you would rather do the org agenda or calendar via md rather then org? I do understand that if that is the case.
> What is wrong with markdown mode?
Nothing. It's just not Org-mode, and thus many great features of Org just not possible - sparse tree search; timestamps with built-in calendaring features; outline features like narrow-to-subtree; editing the subtree in an indirect buffer; executable code blocks; embedded LaTeX snippets; real tables with spreadsheet-like capability; checkbox statistics cookies - [/] and [%]; org-sort; column views; tags and tag inheritance; etc.
Anyone who's familiar with even a small subset of things that's possible in Org-mode and unlikely ever be supported in Markdown (just because there's no agreed format standard) have no confusion about it - Org-mode is absolutely superior. But superior doesn't mean universally better for everyone. The biggest drag of Org-mode is that it can never fully exist outside of Emacs. Yet Markdown can't ever fully cover its grounds (even in Emacs), simply because Markdown has to exist and work outside of Emacs as well.
Else where in this thread you can see my argument is that all org-mode features such as calendar dates, todo's, take your pick could be implemented separate to and utilize markdown (or any other format) for actually rending to. I am familiar with org mode but dislike how it sometimes pushes against simply using elisp for things like setting up todo nodes and possible todo values. couple that with the fact that one could in theory just render this all out to markdown instead and come up with some way to render todos into md.
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Yeup, I would love to have some of the org/agenda operations/views on a regular markdown file. Especially so I could just copy it raw out, and paste into other markdown-centric tools, github md files, etc. for colaborating with others.
Since markdown is becoming so prevalent. Even our product managers are becoming natively conversant with it, I'd just prefer to have as markdown first world.
(don't get me started ranting about how Atlassian and Slack have migrated away from markdown and to proprietary formats....).
Yes must say I have found myself moving away from org and looking at it as an annoyance wrapping up many excellent features that could be wrapped up in simple elisp function and structures that could then just be encoded in what every way one likes, it seems to me that for example todo lists are actually better as nested lisp lists, And then you can simply render as what ever you like. Of course one might like to serialize back as well but I have often wondered about it.
I definitely think markdown has won (at org was never going to 'win' of course given it's limited scope) and actually is probably what we should just all be using and accept.
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Not tested this myself, but there are ways to improve markdown/org-mode interop, like in https://youtu.be/RJqRwlVvB3E
org-mode is a way more powerful literate programming environment which can be exported to many different formats including markdown. In the past, I have collaborated with others with markdown as the sort of interface format. But on the collaboration front and not everyone liking emacs, I found that there's no way around that. I am a huge fan of emacs and use it every day but it is not that great of a collaboration tool due to it not being everyone's cup of tea.
I use markdown and nvim with telekasten plugin on desktop and mobile obsidian and for me is good enough