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Plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience, but we also have the wonderful https://orgmode.org markup.

There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms. Our org markup options, on the other hand, are very few outside of Emacs. Org markup itself is super versatile and can power lots of use-cases.

I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself:

https://plainorg.com

https://flathabits.com

There are other great ones out there:

https://beorg.app

https://logseq.com

https://organice.200ok.ch

https://orgro.org

http://orgzly.com

Lastly, a shoutout to Karl Voit who's been driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs with Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also discussed org markup's strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

7 comments

I've been intensively using Orgmode for a year and a half (wrote my thesis in it) and then abandoned it to switch to Markdown.

Orgmode quickly turns into not-quite-plaintext with humanly impossible to read and very distracting data structs stuck inside the text. I think these were called "Properties"?

For me the beauty of plain-text is that it can be read and written in any Editor without needing syntax highlighting. Here Orgmode fails for me, as I found it unreadable and unusable without an Emacs-esque toolkit.

Yeah, I agree. I use org, but if I'm writing a document I'm in Markdown, not the Org markup. It's just noisy.

Emacs partisans are often very, very sure that the emacs way is always the best way, sort of like evangelicals. (And I say this as a guy who has emacs and orgmode open all day, every day.)

That's a fair gripe, as an Org-mode+Emacs user. I certainly see the clunkiness you experience in its structure. But for me, I find it highly unlikely I'll ever use an editor other than Emacs for anything but basic and quick editing. For things as comprehensive as to necessitate writing in Org-mode, I'd rather do it in Emacs anyways. Need to port it to another editor? Two options: Org-export it to a more portable format, or get started on a comprehensive integration for Org-mode in the new editor.

I personally would be willing to put the time into developing Org-mode functionality on-par with Emacs, in a new editor, if the new editor were to have major advantages over Emacs. But I don't think I'll come across one for a very long time.

The kind of “data-rich” org file you don’t like would presumably be impossible in markdown. So what are you gaining at all? Just don’t write such data-rich org files. That’s totally under your own control.

I wouldn't call those plain text, if it doesn't keep your newlines by default, it's not plain text but a markup language like HTML

BBCode is nice and keeps newlines, but something that uses markdown's syntax for bold and titles, but doesn't remove newline characters, would be ideal

Don't forget asciidoc. Coherent, has markup for things like video etc. It's a superior format to markdown, a pity it's so unknown

Why do you think it's superior to Markdown?

I was also interested in the answer to your question. Here's[1] why AsciiDoc thinks it's better than Markdown.

[1]https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

As someone who lives in a terminal, I find @junegunn’s “journal” markup format a lot more pleasing to the eyes than Markdown — holy kaleidoscopic colours, batman. Bonus: in a weird way, the colours of journal trained me to love lisp.

[1]: https://github.com/junegunn/vim-journal

@xenodium Wow - impressive reviews for your ‘plain org’ app.

When I grow up with my eMacs and org usage (I’m only playing now as org is new to me - but I know it’s what I have been missing!!!) I for sure must give your app a shot for iOS usage

Nice to hear. Thank you. Enjoy your emacs + org journey! It’s quite a fun ride.

> There is no shortage of markdown-based tools on all platforms

Could someone name one decent md editor for Android?

[Markor](https://github.com/gsantner/markor), free, open source and available on F-Droid.

And vimwiki!