[crazygringo]

If you think you'll ever want to use third-party tools to process that markup, or if some of your private files will transform into public files at some point, then yes, considering popularity makes a lot of sense.

If they're just text files you edit raw that will never interact with anything else but your text editor, then of course popularity doesn't matter at all. But in my experience, my use cases tend to expand over time.

The article even talks about org mode's interoperability, mainly about the fact that pandoc supports it. And then bizarrely ignores the fact that it has much less ecosystem support than Markdown. So this is very much a subject the article itself brings up, and something that therefore also deserves to be critiqued.

[adityaathalye]

OP here. I stuck with orgmode all these years /because/ of the interoperability.

If I'm writing in Org, I can tangle / detangle between other plaintext sources, including source code. As well as export to collaborate.

The proposition is "yes, and", not "either / or".

It's /fine/ to switch to the popular "team" standard and stay there when needed. Several of my workplace documents, including wiki entries start off as local org-mode drafts. Once I'm okay to share, I export to markdown or draft wiki page and solicit comments. After that, if the document is for shared maintenance, I let my org-text alone, and switch to the "team" format.

This is perfectly fine.

That and the many kinds of markdown. I've been bitten enough by having to look up yet another poorly maintained document on how to markdown for /this/ particular app or website or utility, that I'd rather pandoc translate between my (sane, well documented, fully extensible) org text and whatever I need to share with others, than learn edge cases of various markdowns.

[crazygringo]

Sure, but I think it's safe to say Markdown has more interoperability, no?

Yes you can always use pandoc, but conversion usually brings quirks of its own. And more generally, the less conversion steps you need, the better.

If you just stick to vanilla markup, you don't encounter incompatibilities. The "many kinds of markdown" isn't an issue if you're not using platform-specific extensions in the first place. Which, usually, you're not, unless you need to do something very specific to that application.

[adityaathalye]

Yes, more interoperability at the cost of capability.

Also, yes, conversion is quirky. That is why Org works until it does, and then I trade off being stymied by markdown's more plain-ness, in favour of collaborating with others.

And with vanilla markup, the trouble is that many applications /do not/ use just vanilla markup. People /invariably/ want "one key tweak" (like, front-matter or table of contents or footnotes or some such thing), and everyone ends up doing their own thing.

Perhaps the trouble with markdown is it's /too/ plain. So yes, lots of people can do lots of lowest common denominator stuff, but it does not extend to individuals wanting "just one thing" which also adds up to a lot of people.

Edit: a real-life example... I typically run code from org-mode for interactive testing and debugging --- the kind of stuff we write small throwaway scripts for.

In this one project, I made it so that /I/ or anyone else using org-mode could do it from org, for local development, and anyone else could just use the script as-is... including the CI pipeline.

[1] https://gitlab.com/nilenso/cats/-/raw/master/README_TESTS.or... (notice that the gitignore procedure needed for this trick is self-executable from this org file itself, in addition to being self documenting)

[2] https://gitlab.com/nilenso/cats/-/blob/master/bin/curl-tests...

[da_chicken]

> Yes, more interoperability at the cost of capability.

Well, then why aren't you using LaTeX? Isn't that more capable?

> And with vanilla markup, the trouble is that many applications /do not/ use just vanilla markup. People /invariably/ want "one key tweak"

And, that's going to be true as someone adopts it outside of Emacs, right?

Surely, someone will decide that the way Org Mode is doing something is wrong, right? They're going to do something like say, "Hey, why don't we permit Markdown style headings, too?" or something similar.

Or are you suggesting Org Mode military police? Felony markup possession?

There's nothing special about Org Mode that makes it immune to the problems you're describing. They will happen immediately upon wider adoption.

And if you somehow do stop it, well, it's tech. If you don't have a patent on it then someone will fork the idea and you'd have Borg Mode directly competing with you anyways.

[adityaathalye]

Sure... I use LaTeX when orgmode is insufficient. And I can use LaTeX from within orgmode too.

Utility is Contextual.

“When you are hungry, eat; when you are thirsty, drink; when you are tired, sleep.” - Wise UNIX Master Foo

----

http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/shell-tools.html

Master Foo and the Shell Tools

A Unix novice came to Master Foo and said: “I am confused. Is it not the Unix way that every program should concentrate on one thing and do it well?”

Master Foo nodded.

The novice continued: “Isn't it also the Unix way that the wheel should not be reinvented?”

Master Foo nodded again.

“Why, then, are there several tools with similar capabilities in text processing: sed, awk and Perl? With which one can I best practice the Unix way?”

Master Foo asked the novice: “If you have a text file, what tool would you use to produce a copy with a few words in it replaced by strings of your choosing?”

The novice frowned and said: “Perl's regexps would be excessive for so simple a task. I do not know awk, and I have been writing sed scripts in the last few weeks. As I have some experience with sed, at the moment I would prefer it. But if the job only needed to be done once rather than repeatedly, a text editor would suffice.”

Master Foo nodded and replied: “When you are hungry, eat; when you are thirsty, drink; when you are tired, sleep.”

Upon hearing this, the novice was enlightened.

[da_chicken]

Okay. You didn't seem to understand that that was a rhetorical question, because you didn't seem to take the next step of reflection.

So, what does your comment to me say if used in response to your own org mode vs markdown comment you made in the post I responded to? You said org mode's capabilities are the reason why you don't want markdown.

You keep making this argument that org mode is just better, but you can immediately find a counterargument yourself to your own point.

Now, it's perfectly fine that that represents how you feel about the software. You can hold whatever opinion you want. But, you're not just trying to explain your opinion. You're trying to convince people that org mode is better. You understand why you're not being very persuasive in your argument, right? You've argued in a way that the only people who will agree with you are those that already hold the same opinion as you.

[thayne]

If I just stick to vanilla markdown, then I don't have features that I would really like in my notes, like tables, footnotes, etc.

[cicko]

Ahem. When I started with Markdown, I was regularly experiencing all the issues mentioned for years. The most popular format was Word (doc). Perhaps I should have stuck with that?