[mtts]

You're getting downvoted and maybe that is somewhat justified on account of the snark, but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

I've tried all of them, paid for some of them and while the best, Beorg, is an excellent TODO-app, nothing available beats the ease of use of a good Markdown editor. If all you want to do is add some notes somewhere or look something up, which I'd argue is the main use case for Org-like files on a mobile device, you'll have to make do with the simplest of text editing tools.

This is unfortunate, because, even though org is plain text it is very messy plain text and without a good tool it is unpleasant to use.

Contrast this to Markdown, which has dozens of tools available, with all the syncing options you can think of and it becomes obvious that Org, despite having fantastic features, and arguably being a better format than Markdown, is only useful inside Emacs.

This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

[HelloNurse]

I'd rather say that phones aren't a good tool for Org-mode: they are very challenged at text input (no keys) and interfaces that avoid text with buttons, dragging, and other reliable gestures have the advantage of minimizing the text and quasi-text input that is the backbone of Org-mode and Emacs in general.

[ubermonkey]

That's a long way of saying that you don't think of phones as a legitimate use case, but the rest of the world mostly disagrees with you.

I've got ten years of orgmode buffers and I'm actively working to transition to Obsidian because the mobile story is so much better. With plugins like tasks, dataview, and outliner, I can do pretty much anything in Obsidian I could do in Org, and I can do it on my iPad without having to SSH to my Linode instance first.

that's powerful.

[ithrow]

How does the outliner obsidian plugin compares to orgmode? My biggest use case for orgmode is as an outliner for projects and the features you can use while outlining like dates, deadlines, schedules, todos, lists, progress indicators for lists and todos, agenda view, notes in outlines headings etc... also how easy is to move outlines around with the keyboard, how you can focus one outline into a new buffer, it's pretty convenient.

[ubermonkey]

It works pretty well for my use case, but its behavior is different in a significant way that I'm hoping will be corrected by an option or by a more org-mode-minded alternative.

In Org, we can do things like this:

  * Outline element
    text under this element
  ** Child of outline element
      some text that belongs to the child element

etc.

The outliner plugin for Obsidian is "outline only," if you take my meaning, so there's no provision for non-outline text in the outline.

[ithrow]

Thanks and yeah, being able to put text under the outline is like the most important feature for me and it's where most outliners fall short.

[ubermonkey]

Agreed. It's what put me off most OTHER outliners, and what eventually drove me from my prior organizational tool. Omnifocus, a Mac tool initially based on the well-loved (and generally excellent) OmniOutliner, had that limitation. I was looking for something where I could seamlessly co-mingle notes AND actions I needed to take, and that would then give me a dynamic view that collated all the actions for me when I wanted it.

Basically, in my imagination, I invented Orgmode and agendas, so I was super happy to discover that it already existed. That capability is weirdly rare in note tools and outliners. (I'm honestly still amazed that OneNote doesn't have this feature -- it seems like a complete no-brainer, and yet...)

Anyway, it's also a simple enough mod of the existing outliner plug-in that I'm hoping someone like me (ie, coming from org) will introduce it as an alternative plug-in. Honestly, a plug-in that would just parse the basics of org markup would be awesome -- with dataview, I don't need it to be capable of agendas or anything. I just want the markup & the outliner behavior.

[EFreethought]

If you are an Emacs user, saying the rest of the world is wrong is pretty easy.

[ParetoOptimal]

> but that is unfortunate IMHO because your first criticism is very valid: there are no good Org tools for phones.

Speaking from an android perspective:

Best is organice (but requires local android webdav server if you don't want to connect to github) for most people design-wise I think.

Others will prefer orgzly.

> This is fine if you live in Emacs and only in Emacs, but if you don't and you'd like to read and modify your files on the go, simply going with the format that for better or worse the rest of the internet has standardized upon, is the much better option.

emacs is available on fdroid now and using a bluetooth keyboard it's a good experience. I hope to improve the touch experience, for instance I recently released a library to make clocking in/out on mobile or just by mouse easier:

https://github.com/ParetoOptimalDev/org-inline-clocking-butt...

I intend to try and make org-mode usable by touch in emacs on android eventually, but it'll be slow and according to things I really need as I need them.

[hoosieree]

Org is not perfect by any means. It crashes occasionally and is sometimes laggy.

I think it's fair to say that for the task of markup only, Markdown is lighter weight and it makes sense that it's implemented (slightly differently) nearly everywhere.

On the other hand, org-mode replaces Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things. This is why I keep using org-mode - not because it's better at markup, but because it's "good enough" at markup, and simultaneously "good enough" at many other things.

[zelphirkalt]

I mostly use org-mode on a computer, with a screen and a keyboard. Markdown uses fewer characters for some things like code blocks (source blocks in org-mode), that is true. That said, not only does org replace Jupyter notebooks, LaTeX, and a dozen other things, it also has markup capabilities, which are simply lacking in Markdown (common mark if you want). For example checklists. Or citation. Or datetimes. Or spreadsheets. Or inclusion of other documents/files at a specifiable heading level. Or tagging of headings. Or marking headings "TODO", "DONE" and similar.

Many things in org-mode are modifiable. For example the "status" of a heading like "TODO", "DONE" and so on. You can add new words in document wide properties at the top of an org file.

I know there are markdown dialects, that partially cover this or that feature, but none to cover all that org provides out of the box.

The org format is much more suitable for any technical or scientific or academic document, that has any slightly raised requirements. In Markdown one often finds oneself using workarounds to make something look nice in the rendered output. Similar to how restructuredtext is powerful and can be used for academic paper writing and all that. Markdown is merely the lowest common denominator, too minimalistic for my taste. Good for a chat or messenger, but not really for good technical documents.

I still have to see a tool for writing markdown, that works as nicely as tooling for org-mode in Emacs, with all the things like changing heading levels for 1 heading or a whole subtree and export buffer or subtree, or cut visible or subtree, widen, narrow, folding, and all those nice things.