[searene]

I think the biggest advantage of Org Mode over Markdown is that Org Mode can attach properties to headers. This seems trivial, but it's not. Because of that, you can:

1. Give a header an id and jump to it from anywhere.

2. Attach scheduling information to the header so that you can easily track TODOs and DONEs. I usually further break down a TODO into several sub-TODOs and write something under each one to organize my thoughts, including code blocks, tables, quotes, footnotes, which is impossible in Markdown.

3. You can attach anything else to it, too. I also attach an Anki note ID to it and use Org Mode as an alternative Anki editing environment. Because of the attached note ID, I can easily distinguish whether I want to create a new Anki card (without an ID) or update an existing one (with an ID). That is also hard to implement in Markdown (Strictly speaking, I don't think it's even possible to implement it in Markdown).

My only complaint is that Emacs is the only text editor that fully supports Org Mode. Other editors (e.g. vim, VSCode) support it too, with only to an extent.

Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

[quanticle]

>My only complaint is that Emacs is the only text editor that fully supports Org Mode. Other editors (e.g. vim, VSCode) support it too, with only to an extent.

My concern with org-mode is a superset of that. The only parser that fully supports org-mode is the one in org-mode itself. The ones not built into org-mode (pandoc, org-ruby, etc) all only support a subset of org's features. This makes writing anything to share in org-mode more difficult because you have to restrict yourself to writing in the subset of org-mode that e.g. pandoc supports.

That's why I laughed quietly to myself when I saw that the author had written, "Org mode is standardized". Org-mode is exactly as standardized as Markdown was when Gruber published Markdown.pl. There is one authoritative implementation (org-mode's elisp, Gruber's perl script), and to be "standard", all other implementations need bug-for-bug compatibility with the authoritative version. The only reason org-mode feels more standardized is that, currently, the only practical way to use org-mode is with the original implementation, in emacs. No doubt the original users of Markdown felt the same way, when using markdown.pl to format their blog posts.

[nanna]

> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

Because it's so integrated with Emacs, and all other editors are second class citizens (/hosts)?

[mumblemumble]

Also, it's kind of right there in the name. "Org Mode". It's not just a markup format, it's an emacs mode.

My org files quickly accumulate custom elisp snippets for automating small one-off things like rendering embedded dot with Graphviz and displaying them inline. I don't think I'm alone in that. Unfortunately, that creates a situation where, whenever I try to work with org files in other editors, there's a certain "it's like opening Photoshop files in MS Paint" aspect to the experience. Too many things that I've come to take for granted about how I'd interact with and edit these files no longer works.

Markdown, on the other hand, is just a markup format. It has lots of dialects, but it isn't really owned by anyone. That creates a very different power structure: Markdown editors are free to just try to make a good Markdown editing/viewing experience, whatever that means to that particular editor's developer. There's no looming and inevitably unfavorable comparison to the format's native editor to have to contend with.

[goohle]

Markdown supports HTML (with JS), and HTML/JS is quite powerful. I can make complex computations and drawings with JS libraries, then present them nicely with custom CSS. Some markdown editors supports embedded HTML/JS in preview, which makes them easy to use as IDE. My favorite editor is Marker[0].

I suspect that I can write embedable applications in JS and load them as libraries in Markdown to perform advanced stunts, like in Org mode.

[0]: https://github.com/fabiocolacio/Marker

[gnull]

Would be funny if someone wrote a language server for org mode in elisp on top of emacs and offered all of its functionality to the other editors.

But jokes aside, is there something that doesn't let us implement a language server for org mode?

[Siira]

I have this idea attempted. It can work if enough engineering is put into it.

[Siira]

Correction: I have seen it attempted.

[Waterluvian]

Until this post I had no clue Org Mode wasn’t just a part of Emacs. It needs a much better name if it wants to be a standalone markup.

[Jtsummers]

Except it's not just a markup format. When connecting it to the agenda system in emacs you end up with emacs lisp snippets (easily, not always) in your org files. And that's just part of the basic usage:

  %%(org-anniversary 2021 11 18) It's been %d years since the 50,000th org-mode thread on HN.

Or with org-babel you can have different blocks of code interact with and reference each other:

https://orgmode.org/manual/Environment-of-a-Code-Block.html

That's a lot more than markup at this point since you can run those inside of org-mode.

[nanna]

Completely agree. I think there's a continuity between the misconception of Org Mode as being just being another markup format and Emacs being just another text editor.

[nybble41]

Emacs is the operating system. Viper is the text editor.

/s

[User23]

Thanks for knocking some cobwebs off the old neural pathways. I’d totally forgotten about viper mode.

[BeetleB]

> It needs a much better name if it wants to be a standalone markup.

It doesn't. There have been failed efforts in standardizing the grammar. If they can't even do that, it's clear that being standalone is not a goal.

[chipotle_coyote]

> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

The reliance on Emacs has been mentioned by a fair number of commenters already, but there's also another issue here, I think -- there are a lot of Markdown variants, and while that's usually described as a flaw rather than a feature, the silver lining is that there probably is a Markdown processor that can handle [thing that you want], from citations to cross-references to math formulas. "But then I'm tied to that variant of Markdown" is a valid objection, but it's not one that's really answered by Org Mode.

In practice, some Markdown syntax that started as "non-standard extensions" -- most notably tables and footnotes -- has been widely adopted by most processors. Several processors I know of do have ways to attach labels or other metadata to sections, such as MultiMarkdown's cross-references.

> I usually further break down a TODO into several sub-TODOs and write something under each one to organize my thoughts, including code blocks, tables, quotes, footnotes, which is impossible in Markdown.

This one I'm not actually sure I'm following. You can certainly insert code blocks, tables, quotes, and footnotes under subheadings and even under indented lists.

Org Mode is absolutely better as a task manager and day planner -- but that's not a function of Org Mode's markup syntax, except to the degree the syntax has specific features for supporting tasks and agendas. It's a function of Org Mode being, well, a mode, with a lot of specific functionality in Emacs. For general purpose document markup, it's probably as good as (e.g.) MultiMarkdown, but not better; if you're comfortable with one, there'd be little obvious reason to switch to the other.

[bloopernova]

> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

Markdown is plain text at one end of the complexity continuum. Microsoft Word is towards the other end. Org-mode is somewhere in-between.

[vegai_]

>Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

Powerful seems to imply complicated to implement. Same reason why markdown is beating asciidoc in everything.

[mmcdermott]

I wonder if being Docbook oriented hurt Asciidoc. At one point, I thought everything, even HTML, went through the Docbook toolchain and customizing Docbook is intimidating.

[reidjs]

I don't like the reliance on emacs. I do a lot of writing on my phone and tablet, which have limited emacs support. That adds some overhead for my writing, which would distract from the main point (writing).

Instead of org mode, I bought a markdown editor for iOS and use that. Then I sync the markdown files to my computer using iCloud.

[bananadonkey]

Orgzly does the job for Android, same workflow you describe but with org files.

Even has system-wide note capture via system drawer which makes jotting notes and ideas very efficient. Something I need to figure out with rofi + org-capture or similar for desktop!

[CorrectHorseBat]

For those who use Android there is Orgzly which can edit and org mode files (but not everything I think)

[aidenn0]

> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.

You can replace "Org Mode" with almost every single markup language out there. Markdown was designed from the start as an 80% solution, and RST, asciidoc, &c. are all more powerful than markdown. For interchange, popularity begets popularity, so it would be surprising if the technically best (in isolation) solution won.

[tga]

In my notes, I put the properties as YAML in a code (‘’’yaml) block starting each heading. Easy to parse and well supported by all editors.