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Org-Mode Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text (2017) (karl-voit.at)
61 points by funkaster 1 hour ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 14 comments





Last I checked, and admittedly it's been a while, parsing full org-mode syntax outside Emacs itself is a nightmare. It's essentially cloning whatever version of org-mode you have in mind.

Not that org-mode's any less for it. I'm no longer a daily user, but I was, for quite some time, to organization a particularly chaotic episode of my work life.


>org-mode is standardized

Last I looked into it (mainly with interest for vim), few if any parsers/tooling exist for it outside of emacs; as I recall, people claimed that it apparently has sufficient (undocumented/poorly specified) quirks in the emacs implementation that 100% reproduction is difficult; similar to implementing vim-mode for editor plugins

In which case, its only as standardized as the one implementation; which is exactly how standardized markdown started with (the perl implementation)


If you haven't seen it yet, check out Markdeep: http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/.

Write in any text editor, and a tiny JS boilerplate turns it into nicely-rendered HTML.


Wow, genious idea.

Org mode is simply awesome and the only reason I open emacs these days. I still haven't managed to find a software, free or paid, which has the same amount of flexibility.

Org-mode and magit were the reasons that I had to use emacs. Ended up falling in love with emacs itself, though.

I've used org-mode both as an organiser and as a simple markup language. It is fantastic for both and far superior to any other that I've used. I will actually write using org-mode and export to formats for others, often using pandoc (which I invoke using the keyboard from emacs, of course).

One weird thing about markdown and other formats is they don't have a title. So people use heading 1 as their title which is strange and wrong.

I simply love being able to type up a document in an environment I'm comfortable in and then exporting it to whatever format is required at the end: html (document or slideshow), pdf, or even MS Turd. I have stylesheets set up for each that actually make my documents look more professional and consistent than people who use those things directly.


    : Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
    : This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.
The trouble with that is you cannot easily copy/paste code to/from it, because you'll need to manually add/subtract the : prefix. Delineating the section with:

    ```
    Simple pre-formatted text such as for source code.
    This also respects the line breaks. *bold* is not bold here.
    ```
is much more practical.

They’re not mentioned in the article, but org-mode does have syntax for source blocks (a little uglier than Commonmark/Github-flavor markdown’s blocks in my opinion, but it does the same thing and works well).

And you can execute that code too with Babel ———> https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/

M-x comment-region

This deserves a little expansion - Org Mode makes the reasonable-in-context assumption that the user is familiar with Emacs.

At that point, adding or removing a ':' is not a repetitive task. Then the ':' notation gains an advantage because selected lines can be copied and automatically keep their formatted status.


In any reasonable editor, “manually add/subtract the prefix” is an easy keyboard shortcut.

Except one is not always able to use an editor, and assuming people are always able to do something is a great downfall of many products or standards made by people with specific uses cases in mind who think their experiences are universally applicable.



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