Comment by geokon
6 hours ago
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.
> A weird poorly specified format that is only fully editable from one editor.
While this has been true historically, the Org maintainers are moving away from that approach.
The example that comes to mind is that parsing and interpretation of formatting markup such as *bold* and /italics/ used to be controllable by Emacs Lisp variables that dictate things like which neighbouring characters cancel the interpretation of the markup as markup, or the maximum allowed distance between delimiters for them to count as a pair. Such things have been moved into standardised parsing routines now, with no variables for customising it.