I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.
Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.
Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.
You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:
- Task state tracking
- Code execution
- Agenda queries
- Time-based organization
- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things
These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.
When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
Org format is reasonably intuitive (so is markdown).
But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc.
This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.
One of the arguments of the article is that there is a fundamental difference: Markdown was created as a small subset of syntax elements. Therefore, there was a high demand on syntax extensions that were added in a chaotic fashion.
Orgdown already comes with more syntax elements that Markdown probably will ever get. So I do see a clear argument for the case that "unstandardized additions" to orgdown are less likely in addition to the fact that there aren't any.
I've recently begun replacing Markdown with Gemini's .gmi/gemtext format. It is Markdown with fewer features. I appreciate the simplicity and it's tremendously easy for custom tools to parse.
It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off.
Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text.
My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.
For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that.
As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.
Btw, which other note taking apps worth talking about exist? I am aware of org-roam and scimax (?) and both look promising but I find that (at least for org-roam) there’s not enough big picture explaining what is going on behind the curtains. That somewhat discouraged me from spending a lot of time with it, but a quick glance did look promising.
Does Org have a mechanism for escaping its own syntax? Last time I searched, to type *this* (keeping the asterisks) you had to insert a zero-width space (U+200B). In markdown you just escape them with \*this\*.
And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so.
Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.
Markdown is worse than other formats in many ways. It has several ambiguities, there are significant variations between implementations, fairly basic features like tables, footnotes, strikethrough, etc. are "extensions" that aren't widely supported.
The only real advantage of markdown is that it is has because more ubiquitous/popular than others, possibly in part because it is relatively easy to implement, as long as you don't care that much about exact compatibility with other implementations.
I would ask you to read the article before writing a comment like that.
The whole point of the article is that there is no Markdown. At least not a single instance from it. So when you're referring to Markdown, you're actually referring to a few dozens of slightly different markup languages which are hard to identify and except for a few, very tedious to convert.
In my opinion, this is far from being "reasonable".
Orgdown is explicitly mentioned only as one LML that doesn't come with the listed downsides of Markdown. So if you think that my article tries to convince you to use orgdown instead, you've missed the part where I say that there are many good alternatives of Markdown that do perform better when it comes to real world processes. I just tried to use orgdown as one example among many to state my point by showing an alternative. If you think that orgdown is the only one, you did not read the article carefully enough.
What if I told you that your analogy breaks completely if you actually consider what Org-mode is. Think of Markdown as a noun (a thing) and Org-mode as a verb (a system that does things). It's like comparing HTML and React components - it's not about "preferable side of the road to drive", we're talking about a complete different mode of transportation - i.e., in a nation where there's infrastructure and roads for cyclists - the rules change from "drive on one side and obey traffic signs..." to be something different. Similar, yet different.
That's what everyone's missing when they try to compare Markdown and Org-mode, while looking at it only through the angle of the markup structure. Markdown is a markup - pure structure, no logic, no state, no content with behavior, no executable source blocks, no embedded logic - and that's the point.
Arguing which one should be "the default choice", is like saying - "just always drive a car, cars are more popular..." - an argument that has no sense whatsoever. If people find Org-mode useful (because it is), well, there's really not much you can do about it, right? Just like you can't tell people to prefer a bike, car, moto or a boat - each has pros and cons and suits different scenarios.
I discovered and started using org-mode (and, as a result, Emacs) when I migrated from Evernote in '16. Today I use it for all my project, task and knowledge management needs, with some files going over 15MB in size. And I'm still loving it. Started out with headers only, and every time I wanted something more, it was always just there for the taking. Easy to use, and also crazy powerful. Can't think of anything else that exhibits both those traits at once.
I love org mode and used eMacs for years. I felt like I had to switch to neovim and thus markdown for lots of reasons. Overall neovim has been a better experience for me but I do miss org mode.
And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed.
I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.
All well and good, but some Org Mode markup symbols are badly chosen if the purpose is human-to-human communication, and that is a profound demerit for a system that purports to structure and facilitate human-to-human communication. Most notably, asterisks are not good section headers. Pound signs are.
So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system.
YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.
I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need.
In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ
Using parentheses to delimit the URL is one thing I don't like about markdown, since parentheses are valid in URL curly braces or angle bracket would have been a better choice.
It is [0]. All the pages are generated from org sources. If you scroll to the bottom of any page there is a link. Also tec used to have an overlay that would show you the org source directly, but ultimately it was decided that it should not be enabled because it required javascript and could be confusing.
Hmm with the way people go on about it I always assumed there was more to Org mode than "Markdown for Emacs", but this post makes it sound exactly like that.
He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!".
Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?
I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown.
That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both?
Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date.
Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text!
> "Either way I think the losers are going to be [...] maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date."
Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial.
Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF).
And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.
I'm sorry. You're starting a totally different topic here.
I tried to emphasize in my article that this is about orgdown, the syntax of Org-mode which itself is an Elisp implementation of a flexible tool.
So whenever you refer to tools like Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira, ... you're discussing tools and not lightweight markup languages and where Markdown has downsides nobody seems to know of which was the goal of my article.
Sure - florists, influencers and soccer moms don't use Org-mode. Real hackers do, because it is extremely developer-oriented. And of course it won't ever be more popular, simply because there are far more soccer moms in the world and not too many hackers.
To be clear: I mean "no one uses org mode" hyperbolically, but there's a causative reason why markdown's popularity has led to twenty variants: When a ton of people use anything, it often needs to be tweaked to fit many different use-cases. If orgmode had the popularity that markdown had, it would also have twenty variants; its characteristic of being highly consistent is not a reflection of some internal design or authority that aligns it toward consistency; its a reflection of dispopularity.
I am aware of no evidence supporting the claim that orgmode is more developer-oriented than markdown. It is identical to markdown in ~80% of the formatting directives people widely use. The remaining ~20% are mostly stylistic choices (would you rather hit the # key or the % key). Most of the unique capabilities orgmode offers (e.g. programming language syntax highlighting) are functionally covered by popular markdown extensions available everywhere someone interacting with markdown would work (e.g. Github, Obsidian).
This is a religious war, not engineering. Use what works for you.
Expressing complex HTML or LaTeX constructs in org-mode is more complicated than writing the raw HTML or LaTeX. So for complex things, I'll always fall back to writing HTML or LaTeX directly. Markdown, instead, just falls back to HTML. Whatever I can't express in markdown, I can simply insert the HTML by hand. These markup languages are always fine for simple things, but have a hard time expressing more complicated things.
Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.
That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.
I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.
I've been using Org Mode for organizing my life in plain text for the past 10 years now.
Beorg on iOS [0] makes it great. I've also started using things like org-ql [1] and org-super-agenda [2] to make me even more productive.
I also have a daily log org file I use at work. It helps me keep track of what I need to do and what I've done. It makes yearly reviews easier as well!
46 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 59.3 ms ] threadI think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.
Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.
Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.
You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:
- Task state tracking
- Code execution
- Agenda queries
- Time-based organization
- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things
These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.
When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
But org's real power comes from org-mode and the rest of Emacs. Being able to use it as PIM, as a quick way to write documents and export them, as a way to take notes, the keystrokes which are almost automatic for any Emacs user etc.
This is really why it shines. I don't see much value for it as just a markdown format outside Emacs.
And I do come from the daily practice with Markdown and not academic arguments alone - which I also fancy, I have to admit.
Orgdown already comes with more syntax elements that Markdown probably will ever get. So I do see a clear argument for the case that "unstandardized additions" to orgdown are less likely in addition to the fact that there aren't any.
It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off.
Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text.
My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.
As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.
And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so.
Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.
The only real advantage of markdown is that it is has because more ubiquitous/popular than others, possibly in part because it is relatively easy to implement, as long as you don't care that much about exact compatibility with other implementations.
The whole point of the article is that there is no Markdown. At least not a single instance from it. So when you're referring to Markdown, you're actually referring to a few dozens of slightly different markup languages which are hard to identify and except for a few, very tedious to convert.
In my opinion, this is far from being "reasonable".
Orgdown is explicitly mentioned only as one LML that doesn't come with the listed downsides of Markdown. So if you think that my article tries to convince you to use orgdown instead, you've missed the part where I say that there are many good alternatives of Markdown that do perform better when it comes to real world processes. I just tried to use orgdown as one example among many to state my point by showing an alternative. If you think that orgdown is the only one, you did not read the article carefully enough.
YMMV
What if I told you that your analogy breaks completely if you actually consider what Org-mode is. Think of Markdown as a noun (a thing) and Org-mode as a verb (a system that does things). It's like comparing HTML and React components - it's not about "preferable side of the road to drive", we're talking about a complete different mode of transportation - i.e., in a nation where there's infrastructure and roads for cyclists - the rules change from "drive on one side and obey traffic signs..." to be something different. Similar, yet different.
That's what everyone's missing when they try to compare Markdown and Org-mode, while looking at it only through the angle of the markup structure. Markdown is a markup - pure structure, no logic, no state, no content with behavior, no executable source blocks, no embedded logic - and that's the point.
Arguing which one should be "the default choice", is like saying - "just always drive a car, cars are more popular..." - an argument that has no sense whatsoever. If people find Org-mode useful (because it is), well, there's really not much you can do about it, right? Just like you can't tell people to prefer a bike, car, moto or a boat - each has pros and cons and suits different scenarios.
Still.
Decades later.
The only spec is a single implementation. Which is probably why approximately nothing else supports it.
CommonMark on the other hand is very widely supported and all of them work great together. I'll stick to CommonMark.
I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.
Edit: I wonder if the vim community can contribute to a feature bounty like this? Hmm
So people are not going to switch from Markdown for most purposes. It feels really wrong. And they will generally prefer one system.
YMMV obviously, some people have an easier time managing polyglot systems. But if the goal is to have One System, it won't be Org Mode. It'll be some version of Markdown. Perhaps Org Mode reskinned to look more like Markdown.
I do wish Markdown were more capable, but it's a good lowest common denominator for HTML and PDF. Also Pandoc-flavored markdown is pretty decent.
My current flow is:
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> HTML -> page-splitter -> split HTML
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF
That last one is slow, and I'm hoping to replace it with Typst, probably:
Markdown -> preprocess -> pandoc -> docbook -> xlstproc -> typst -> PDF
I've tried other things like Sphinx and it's tough to find something that checks all the boxes I need.
In general, though, I'm pretty impressed with Typst. I wrote a test program that takes the XML output from cmark-gfm and converts it to Typst with xsltproc. It produces PDFs in orders of magnitude less time than Pandoc/LaTeX. I use that now for all my casual PDF documents. https://github.com/beejjorgensen/xml2typ
0. https://git.sr.ht/~bzg/orgweb
He's also not exactly gaining credibility with "Markdown is useless because it's not standardised; there are lots of slightly different implementations"... Well yeah that's mildly annoying but it's still very useful! And then he completely throws away all credibility with "this isn't a problem with Org mode because Emacs is the only implementation!".
Can anyone tell me an actual reason to use Org mode over Markdown?
Markdown is great for paragraph-like documents.
I've used both for a long time, and have found markdown to be a poor replacement for org-mode and org-mode to be a bad replacement for markdown.
That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both?
Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date.
Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text!
[0] https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...
Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial.
Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF).
And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.
I tried to emphasize in my article that this is about orgdown, the syntax of Org-mode which itself is an Elisp implementation of a flexible tool.
So whenever you refer to tools like Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira, ... you're discussing tools and not lightweight markup languages and where Markdown has downsides nobody seems to know of which was the goal of my article.
I am aware of no evidence supporting the claim that orgmode is more developer-oriented than markdown. It is identical to markdown in ~80% of the formatting directives people widely use. The remaining ~20% are mostly stylistic choices (would you rather hit the # key or the % key). Most of the unique capabilities orgmode offers (e.g. programming language syntax highlighting) are functionally covered by popular markdown extensions available everywhere someone interacting with markdown would work (e.g. Github, Obsidian).
This is a religious war, not engineering. Use what works for you.
Perhaps some kind of escape mechanism, like typst, would solve this. But org-mode doesn't.
That said, org-mode-the-program (not org-mode-the-syntax) is just fantastic, and nothing else comes close. For me, this doesn't outweigh its problems. Obsidian is a good-enough alternative.
I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup. Last year, I did the same for my journal. I'm a bit sad to "leave", but it does simplify things.
Eh? This makes no sense! You can embed any HTML and LaTeX easily in the doc. And you could since I encountered org over 15 years ago.
Since 2009 all my LaTeX and Beamer docs have been written in org. I lose nothing by using org.
> I've recently converted my blog from org-mode to markdown. 1000 lines of elisp, replaced with 200 lines of Python, and a 50x speedup.
I use Pelican which uses rst. But it was pretty trivial to write a plugin in Python to have it support org files.
Beorg on iOS [0] makes it great. I've also started using things like org-ql [1] and org-super-agenda [2] to make me even more productive.
I also have a daily log org file I use at work. It helps me keep track of what I need to do and what I've done. It makes yearly reviews easier as well!
[0]: https://www.beorgapp.com/
[1]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-ql
[2]: https://github.com/alphapapa/org-super-agenda
Markdown doesn’t require Vim.
https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...
Tadaaaa!
Furthermore: Markdown requires a magic crystal ball to tell which Markdown flavor it actually is and how to process it for machines. Read the article.
Markdown would get more things done if it wasn't tied to the waist to chaos. ;-)
I wrote some code that exports html to a Jekyll static site, but really it works with anything that expects html.