Item — HN Reader

Plain text can be super versatile (task-tracking and note-taking are great examples), but equally important are the guarantees that your content is truly yours (no lock-in).

With all these plain text posts surfacing regularly, I'd love for the lesser-known org markup (https://orgmode.org) to gain more adoption. It's a real power-house. Its Emacs origin may put some off, but it's plain text, so your content can be ingested/consumed by either regular text editors or any app focusing on specific user-journeys.

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://braintool.org

https://easyorgmode.com

https://logseq.com

https://organice.200ok.ch

https://orgro.org

http://orgzly.com

Thanks to Karl Voit for driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs via Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also got a great post showcasing org strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

6 comments

What are the advantages orgmode has over markdown

Karl Voit does it a lot more justice than I would https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

Also there's a super comprehensive guide if you want to go all in on Emacs side of things. It's written in org itself http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.org and exported to html http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html.

I dunno, that kinda seems like throwing a bunch of straw-man arguments and unjustified claims like

>Anybody using a simple text editor is very fast at adding markup for headings, font variations, and so forth. The previous section proved that other markup languages clearly fail in many cases.

Markdown is not quick to add markup with a simple text editor? Really?

Org mode has weird and nasty corners and multiple ways to do things too, they're just ignoring them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30523684

Then there's

>Org Mode Has Excellent Tool Support

No, it has a single tool's support and no spec (though it's in progress last I saw, which is great). Almost everything else compared in that page is superior here, having specs (even if multiple competing specs, e.g. commonmark vs github) and multiple implementations.

You can run pretty much any programming language from within org-mode and have literate lab/reports/configurations. Since org is tightly integrated with Emacs, there's also much more interaction with code in general (Emacs Lisp) which lets you do pretty crazy things. Like run and output SQL queries to your document or have interaction à la Jupyter Notebook.

For me it has 3 advantages:

* Excellent outliner features, similar to those from OmniOutliner for example

* Great support for tables (including mini spreadsheets), links, footnotes / citations, tags / keywords and timestamps

* The ability to build interpreters that create views of one or several documents

The last feature looks weird and exotic, but it is super useful. For example a kanban is just a view that displays e.g. ongoing tasks and forthcoming deadlines harvested from your org files. Actually, Emacs already has this feature implemented as the function org-agenda. But you can build other equivalent views.

(If you know, of course:) How well does org-mode play with Pandoc? Much of my workflow goes from Markdown > LaTeX, and Pandoc works pretty well for that. Thanks!

There's pandoc-mode in Emacs and that lets you fully integrate pandoc with org if needed. But you can also convert org files to LaTeX and PDF directly. That's how I take all my notes.

Orgmode is awesome but it's frustratingly difficult to use outside Emacs, and using Emacs isn't an option or productive for the vast majority of people, far, far too much cognitive overhead. Im hoping for a hybrid that is easier to read as plain markup but has the extensibility of org.

> Orgmode is awesome but it's frustratingly difficult to use outside Emacs

Ah yes. I get the Emacs part putting some folks off. Org markup is super capable and stands on its own merit. I’d love for it to be more independently recognised, spurring a rich and diverse ecosystem of org-powered tools (outside of Emacs).

I’m scratching my own itch for iOS but also taking feature requests along the way :) https://plainorg.com https://flathabits.com

I've found Obsidian pretty great, but it's not opensource. It has a pretty alive community as well and it's all just text and pictures in the end, so it stays in your control.

I'm a big fan of obsidian and use it for all my notes already but being basically just text, links, and pictures, it's easy to long for the power of org-mode.

THat is true but after trying to get the hang of it for a week I was back to obsidian :) . I think it would take months, and since I don't use emacs as my regular editor it just wasn't worth the cognitive load.

Why two apps, Plainorg & Flathabits? If I wanted to use one, which one should I use?

I believe you missed checking out the websites. The two apps are pretty different but do focuses on the philosophy of the simplicity of plaint ext. Interesting Apps.

Edit: I'm not the OP

Do you (or anyone else) know of any tools to help with the autofocus system?

> the guarantees that your content is truly yours (no lock-in).

Maybe I am a magician of some kind, but my content is always mine, regardless of the file type I use.

For the sake of argument, let's say I have a floppy disk with a Vizawrite file on it, that I typed 30 years ago. There is no lock-in. I still can use that file.

There are at least two problems with proprietary file formats.

First is the app lock-in, which perhaps hasn’t bitten you but not everyone is so fortunate, especially in a scenario the article describes, corporate environments where you can’t install arbitrary software onto the machine you use.

The other problem is corruption. I haven’t experienced this in a few years, but it’s certainly not unheard-of for a binary data file to experience corruption; often the only way to recover it is to perform surgery on it, which not everyone will have the tools and skills to do.

Plain text files are much safer in that regard.

This argument always sounds superficial to me.

1) You can have corruption in files of any type. Text is no more robust to random bit flips. Pick a file format and there are often tools that can isolate the corruption to a small portion to recover everything else.

2) The solution to lock-in is not "let's make everything text", but "let's have open file formats". Many types of data, especially for project-management-like tools, aren't particularly well suited as plain text (or a markdown format). So many extra unnecessary parsing/regex steps have to be jumped through for the program to use it, and the sanitizing functions now have to be moved from code to the user's brain to not break things.

By all means, support open file formats and exporting functionality. But shoehorning -everything- into text sounds like some crazy mix of bikeshedding and worldbuilding. Why waste your time? Especially knowing MD will fall out of favor eventually, and a new format du jour will rise. What will you do then?

> Text is no more robust to random bit flips

Erm, a single bitflip will ruin, at maximum, a single character, which probably has enough context around it to be easily manually repaired.

Not so pretty much any compressed, encrypted or binary format... either a large chunk of it gets undecodable or the whole thing is lost.

Not universally true. But, regardless, most files are not text.

> But, regardless, most files are not text

Hence the initial post. (Are we running in circles now?)

I'm pointing out that everyone is comfortable with most files not being human-readable. And that it's a red herring to suggest that text is the longest-lived format. I'm sure my data could outlive text files if I "stored" it on granite blocks, but it's not very useful in that format. Same with plain text; it just isn't a very useful format.

The app lock-in doesn't make me lose access to my content. Many proprietary formats are supported by import/export in major apps. There are converter tools. Also, I do not need to switch apps.

The problem with corruption is solved by backups. It's a solved problem.

Yes, I can do all that, with a lot more effort, or just use plain text for content that doesn't need more and be happy with a simpler solution

> The problem with corruption is solved by backups

well, and checksums. otherwise you might not be aware of that bitrot. FEC would be ideal.

But can you get your data out of Vizawrite and into some other tool and edit it there? And will Vizawrite get ported onto all the environments you might want to work in? (eg does it have a mobile app?)

The value of plain text with markup is that any of the tools @xenodium mentions above can work with data from any of the others. I use emacs/org to edit my data from BrainTool, I use Orgzly on the same file on my Android and its also part of my LogSeq digital knowledge garden.

I understand with text files you like the flexibility and independence you describe. You call that the value of plain text and I agree.

However, that doesn't make me lose control over my content, if I don't use plain text files, which was my actual argument.