I hear so many people rave about orgmode on HN, all of them emacs users. This seems obvious since it is an emacs feature after all, but if orgmode is so good, has it not been implemented outside of emacs? Is there a standalone orgmode implementation that non-emacs users should look into?
thecsw 2 hours ago [-]
Orgmode got me through college, research, and at work, it really is the perfected markup language that can do a lot more than just being a markup language. The extensibility and out of the box export to other formats makes it immediately useful for at least 80% of common tasks.
It has ingrained itself so deeply into my muscle memory that I built out a whole website builder [1] and extended the language to support all kinds of nice QoL things for my website [2].
Something that as the other commenter here noted—I can rely on orgmode for many decades to come.
I have on gripe, that is the mixture between org structure and org document heradings. I know, they are the same, and such a distinction doesn't exist.
You can start a "document" at any place in the org hierachy. I would rather prefer a distintion between these two concepts.
Nesco 2 hours ago [-]
To people using org mode, how does it help you more than Markdown? Genuinely curious because I tried at some point and it felt too heavy.
Maybe because I am a vim user instead of eMacs?
impulsivepuppet 1 hours ago [-]
Org mode offers so much more than just syntax. You can use org files as a calendar, a todo/issue tracker with time accounting, a diary/knowledge base (zettelkasten, org-roam), as a literate programming tool (think jupyter code notebooks but for practically any programming language with org-babel), or a publishing tool (static site generator, latex/pdf export) all at the same time.
To be quite frank, Org mode is a lifestyle which existed long before Notion or Obsidian did. Saying that it has a barrier to entry is a bit of an understatement.
Having said all that, quite ironically, I've migrated over to Obsidian because I started using Intellij more for work, meaning that I don't need Emacs for its other capabilities all that much.
stevekemp 1 hours ago [-]
First of all "emacs" rather than "eMacs".
But to answer your main question, markdown is used for writing text which can then be converted to HTML, PDF, etc, etc. It's used just to format things. org can be used in that way, and it might feel better/worse depending on what you feel about the choices used for various formatting styles.
However the big gain of org is that you can use it to format dynamic tables, handle todo-lists, have deadlines, recurring tasks, etc, etc. It makes no sense to compare org-files with markdown-files. It's like saying "I use notepad how does Excel help you do more?" - they do different thigns.
Now, much like excel, most people don't do everythign with org, but they can if they want to. It is extraordinarily flexible, and can be extended with custom lisp code if necessary.
I track rental properties with an org-document for each property, and I get per-year profit/loss statements in a neat format with graphs too. You can't do that with markdown.
myaccountonhn 19 minutes ago [-]
I don't use it anymore but org-babel allows you to execute commands in code blocks. I would use that to build interactive explorations when learning how APIs work for example. I didn't find that nearly as seamless with Markdown.
Combined with org-agenda you also unlock a calendar with recurring events, task priorities and more.
jcynix 1 hours ago [-]
Markdown is a markup tool, i.e. you decorate your text. Orgmode on the other hand is a complete toolbox where you can add tags to notes, filter on these tags, manage calendars, etc. You can enter tables both for formatting and spreadsheet like calculation.
And you can insert snippets of code into your notes, like
#+BEGIN_SRC shell
ls | wc -l
find . -type f -name "*foo*"
#+END_SRC
(or javascript, elisp, html, ... instead of shell) where the markup is changed appropriately in these regions.
You can even augment orgmode with elisp code if you are so inclined.
uludag 2 hours ago [-]
I'm on my seventh year of using org-mode for my task management. My system has slowly evolved over time but I'm pretty much still using the same single text file to manage everything. My main getting-things-done org-mode file is now at 6k lines long.
Before org-mode, I was always downloading different software to manage tasks and notes. The tool churn was very degrading to my productivity but I feel that commercial interests would keep turning the churn machine: new UI changes, enshitification, monthly subscriptions, etc.
It's such a refreshing feeling, sitting back, and feeling assured that for the next presumably 25 years of my career, and perhaps for the rest of my life, I can still be using org-mode, and it will always work as I learned it, but it's flexible enough to easily implement extensions.
hodanli 2 hours ago [-]
i like logseq as somewhat modern iteration of org-mode
account-5 2 hours ago [-]
What lead you to choose that over say obsidian, notion, Joplin, and the many others that pretty much do the same thing?
jcynix 1 hours ago [-]
Orgmode is more than just a note keeping tool, it is a complete and complex toolbox. I can use tables like a spreadsheet, include source code snippets, etc.
Joplin is fine, especially for shared note keeping. We store its notes on a private WebDAV server and everyone in the family can access these notes from their laptops or mobile devices.
But the editing capabilities of Joplin are dismal. Try to swap lines (on a smartphone, no mouse), change the same term in a number of notes, or do some more complex editing operations. These are easily done in emacs/orgmode, even on a smartphone or tablet ... ,at least with emacs running in Termux under Android.
innocentoldguy 2 hours ago [-]
I switched from Obsidian to Logseq because Logseq has better block-level support, better embedded image previews, and more functionality out of the box without having to rely on plugins
Why not Notion or Joplin? I like Logseq's outline format better than Joplin's long-form note taking format, and I just don't like Notion at all for purely subjective reasons.
Rendered at 08:54:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It has ingrained itself so deeply into my muscle memory that I built out a whole website builder [1] and extended the language to support all kinds of nice QoL things for my website [2].
Something that as the other commenter here noted—I can rely on orgmode for many decades to come.
[1] https://github.com/thecsw/darkness [2] https://sandyuraz.com
You can start a "document" at any place in the org hierachy. I would rather prefer a distintion between these two concepts.
Maybe because I am a vim user instead of eMacs?
To be quite frank, Org mode is a lifestyle which existed long before Notion or Obsidian did. Saying that it has a barrier to entry is a bit of an understatement.
Having said all that, quite ironically, I've migrated over to Obsidian because I started using Intellij more for work, meaning that I don't need Emacs for its other capabilities all that much.
But to answer your main question, markdown is used for writing text which can then be converted to HTML, PDF, etc, etc. It's used just to format things. org can be used in that way, and it might feel better/worse depending on what you feel about the choices used for various formatting styles.
However the big gain of org is that you can use it to format dynamic tables, handle todo-lists, have deadlines, recurring tasks, etc, etc. It makes no sense to compare org-files with markdown-files. It's like saying "I use notepad how does Excel help you do more?" - they do different thigns.
Now, much like excel, most people don't do everythign with org, but they can if they want to. It is extraordinarily flexible, and can be extended with custom lisp code if necessary.
I track rental properties with an org-document for each property, and I get per-year profit/loss statements in a neat format with graphs too. You can't do that with markdown.
Combined with org-agenda you also unlock a calendar with recurring events, task priorities and more.
And you can insert snippets of code into your notes, like
(or javascript, elisp, html, ... instead of shell) where the markup is changed appropriately in these regions.You can even augment orgmode with elisp code if you are so inclined.
Before org-mode, I was always downloading different software to manage tasks and notes. The tool churn was very degrading to my productivity but I feel that commercial interests would keep turning the churn machine: new UI changes, enshitification, monthly subscriptions, etc.
It's such a refreshing feeling, sitting back, and feeling assured that for the next presumably 25 years of my career, and perhaps for the rest of my life, I can still be using org-mode, and it will always work as I learned it, but it's flexible enough to easily implement extensions.
Joplin is fine, especially for shared note keeping. We store its notes on a private WebDAV server and everyone in the family can access these notes from their laptops or mobile devices.
But the editing capabilities of Joplin are dismal. Try to swap lines (on a smartphone, no mouse), change the same term in a number of notes, or do some more complex editing operations. These are easily done in emacs/orgmode, even on a smartphone or tablet ... ,at least with emacs running in Termux under Android.
Why not Notion or Joplin? I like Logseq's outline format better than Joplin's long-form note taking format, and I just don't like Notion at all for purely subjective reasons.