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I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.

Org format is reasonably intuitive (so is markdown).

But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc.

This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.

I use Markdown for all my books, currently. It used to be a custom XML format, but that was really annoying to type even with custom Vim keybindings.

I do wish Markdown were more capable, but it's a good lowest common denominator for HTML and PDF. Also Pandoc-flavored markdown is pretty decent.

My current flow is:

Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML

Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML -> page-splitter -> split HTML

Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF

That last one is slow, and I'm hoping to replace it with Typst, probably:

Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> docbook -> xlstproc -> typst -> PDF

I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need.

In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ

I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown.

That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both?

Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date.

Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text!

[0] https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...

I've been using Org Mode for organizing my life in plain text for the past 10 years now.

Beorg on iOS [0] makes it great. I've also started using things like org-ql [1] and org-super-agenda [2] to make me even more productive.

I also have a daily log org file I use at work. It helps me keep track of what I need to do and what I've done. It makes yearly reviews easier as well!

[0]: https://www.beorgapp.com/

[1]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql

[2]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda

Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.

Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.

That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.

I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.

Sure.

And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so.

Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.

I've recently begun replacing Markdown with Gemini's .gmi/gemtext format. It is Markdown with fewer features. I appreciate the simplicity and it's tremendously easy for custom tools to parse.

It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off.

Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text.

My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.

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.

For me, org-mode's big advantage over Markdown is org-mode's macro capability. For years I've been using emacs and org-mode to develop my online course book; each semester I export the then-current draft in HTML to post on the Web. I use lots of macros to expand text, evaluate emacs lisp expressions, etc.

Example: In an upcoming revision, I'm wrestling with what to call the book's model contract clauses, so {{{NOUN-C}}} expands to "Clause" or "Rule" or "Plan" or "Protocol" depending on my current vacillation state. Other macros include {{{NOUN-C}}} as components.

Example: At the top of the HTML page there's a date stamp as a macro that evaluates an emacs lisp expression.

I'm not posting a link here because the HN effect might bust out my (paid) usage limits at my host, site44.com. That's a great hosting site, by the way, with terrific support by one of its two people (founders, I'd guess). It automatically syncs a dedicated folder I maintain on Dropbox, so all I have to do is save changes to that folder and seconds later the change shows up at the online version.

If org more was as successful as markdown it would likely also have a lot of unstandardized additions.

Org mode is great for outline like documents.

Markdown is great for paragraph-like documents.

I've used both for a long time, and have found markdown to be a poor replacement for org-mode and org-mode to be a bad replacement for markdown.

Will a full complete org mode ever come to vim? A man can hope…

Edit: I wonder if the vim community can contribute to a feature bounty like this? Hmm

All well and good, but some Org Mode markup symbols are badly chosen if the purpose is human-to-human communication, and that is a profound demerit for a system that purports to structure and facilitate human-to-human communication. Most notably, asterisks are not good section headers. Pound signs are.

So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system.

YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.

Hmm with the way people go on about it I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that.

He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!".

Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?

I love writing blog posts with org mode. I wrote a blog post about blog posting in org mode. https://justinhj.github.io/2020/03/09/how-to-blog-with-org-m...

I wrote some code that exports html to a Jekyll static site, but really it works with anything that expects html.

But what's really gonna bake your noodle is the revelation that Emacs is one of the most reasonable ways to edit text.

I love org mode and used eMacs for years. I felt like I had to switch to neovim and thus markdown for lots of reasons. Overall neovim has been a better experience for me but I do miss org mode.

Using parentheses to delimit the URL is one thing I don't like about markdown, since parentheses are valid in URL curly braces or angle bracket would have been a better choice.

Question: why is `https://orgmode.org/` in html and not in ... org mode?

It would get more adoption if it wasn’t tied to the waist to emacs.

Markdown doesn’t require Vim.

Given pandoc, as well as Emacs export tools if you stick to a minimum, you generally can move between a lot of formats freely. If I live in org mode for work tracking, I can also be in README.md trivially.

The whole "markdown isn't standardised" point is just bullshit. Any place that supports markdown will support the basics and some places having extra features is a good thing! The only thing worse than not having a feature you need in some app is not having that feature in any app.

And the differences that exist between implementations are there for a reason. Do you think chat apps would let you have headings or footnotes or whatever if they used org mode syntax? No, they don't want to give you those formatting options, so if they used org mode instead of Markdown, they'd just rip it out of there too. And now you have the same problem.

And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed.

I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.

markdown

We do not need another competing standard here. Markdown is adequate and more importantly widely adopted and growing.

The only reason why Org mode doesn’t have twenty variants like Markdown is because no one uses it.

Does Org have a mechanism for escaping its own syntax? Last time I searched, to type *this* (keeping the asterisks) you had to insert a zero-width space (U+200B). In markdown you just escape them with \*this\*.

For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that.

As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.

Author of the article here:

It hurts me to read through the comments. One part of the people who commented obviously didn't read the article they're commenting on.

And another part of the commenters does mix up Org-mode, the Elisp implementation within Emacs, with orgdown, the lightweight syntax which is actually the topic of this article. This part of the discussion is totally missing the whole point of my article: practical issues related to Markdown; choosing any other LML which doesn't come with those downsides. Orgdown was just one example of many which I wanted to mention because it is one of the least known alternatives outside the Emacs bubble.

I extended the article accordingly and also answered to a comment that came via email.

HTH