I love org-mode, but if I were king, it would accept freakin' back-quotes for monospaced text. Instead, it takes ~tilde~ or =equals=, and I will never remember the difference no matter how many times I look it up.
But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:
- Alternative syntax for _italic_ *italic* and __bold__ **bold** (why?)
- versus using /italic/ and *bold*. It just feels so right
- You need to use HTML tags <u>to underline</u>, or <s>strikethrough</s>, or just about anything in Markdown (including line breaks! You need to use the <br> tag)
- +strikethrough+ is alright, but _underline_ just makes sense
- Lack of a unified Markdown standard:
- Diminishes portability (e.g. varying approaches for file meta tags like in Obsidian)
- Causes different renderings of the same document (e.g. Obsidian vs GitHub)
- There was a serious standardization effort in 'Standard Markdown', only for the original creator to be a knob about it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/
It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).
I switch between Markdown and Org Mode a lot, the syntactic differences don't bother me too much, but I guess I like Markdown's a bit more. But what I really miss in Markdown:
6. Inline LaTeX and document generation in general.
Now 1 is just an editor feature, and some of these others could be, too. But I wish Markdown was more powerful, extensible, or less ubiquitous.
What bothers me most about Org Mode is that support is pretty limited outside Emacs. We use it as a wiki replacement at my company, for that integrations into other editors are kinda good enough. But there's some areas like reporting only Emacs users can realistically work on. GitLab (and Forgejo, which we recently switched to) render Org pretty nicely, so it's easy to consume in a browser. But editing is a different story.
So I guess I wish for either a less complex (and thus easier to support) Org, or a more powerful Markdown.
I’ve seen a lot of apps extend markdown to support various additional features. Obsidian, for example, has an extensive number of community plugins which offer a ton of features.
This of course ends up being editor specific, but if org has the same limitation, by being tied to emacs, is it really any different? I think what emacs has going for it in this case is that it’s been around for decades, and we can assume it will continue to be around for decades into the future. The markdown editor de jour may not be.
This is also the primary hangup that's kept me from adopting org-mode for notes, and I instead keep everything in MarkDown, and miss out on all the org-mode organization effects. The differences in link syntax are hard too, but I've got 5-10 years of DokuWiki in my history that make the link syntax more palatable. However, I still prefer MarkDown syntax for links too...
I also like [Markdown's text first](https://hyperlink.com) then link format much more than [[https://hyperlink.com][Orgmode's link first then text]].
But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:
It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.