I hope org-mode gets more popular outside of Emacs. I know all the words already about how org-mode is great because of Emacs, but the way you can do plaintext outlining, with great support for TODO's, in org-mode is fantastic. It retains a lot of readability, and that isn't Emacs specific: there are things that make org-mode great as-is!
A small todo application for mobile that uses org-mode as the database doesn't need to parse fancy org-babel stuff, except maybe that org-mode itself can be hard to parse.
Personally I'm hopeful that org-mode gets some more love outside of Emacs, so here's a list of interesting org-mode projects that aren't pandoc or Emacs related:
Well despite the website being ambiguous about Worg until finding the about page, I support the project. I just hope it isn't as obtuse in its actualy tutorials.
We are Worg. Resistance is futile. You will be put into a tree structure, given completion statuses, timestamps, properties, and hyperlinks. Your formatting distinctiveness will be incorporated into our own.
> The page you're reading is part of Worg, a section of the Org-mode web site that is written by a volunteer community of Org-mode fans: Worg sources are hosted here.
It includes tutorials, ideas, code snippets, etc., shared to make your introduction and customization of Org-mode as easy as possible. Worg is maintained by a group of Worg contributors, and maybe you.
So many good words, but they all miss the crucial point: you can't write a parser for org-mode. So elisp interpreted is needed to run the lisp code that defines it. It means that org-mode can be good while you are using it from emacs, and it sucks for anything else.
I use markdown now, because you have a lot of tools to deal with markdown, while all tools for org-mode are bound to emacs. Which is perfectly fits the emacs philosophy of emacs being an operating system, but it is not for me. It was fun 20 years ago, but now when I'm thinking of tinkering with emacs configuration for hours to get anything done, I feel an impulse to run away.
There are incomplete parsers that cover most of the Org basics. For example, GitHub has one, crafted in Ruby. They use it to render e.g. readme.org files in repositories. It works quite well. I find the Org format very pleasant to work with.
I think the trick with Emacs and Org is to stick to the basics and then only add features or change your configuration very slowly, as needed. I have been using Emacs non-stop for >20 years and my .emacs is just 20 LOC. It's been shrinking, not growing. My goal is to bring it down towards 0 LOC. I have committed a few things upstream to modernize defaults.
Personally, I think the reputation of Org, Emacs, or Nix being hard and complex is undeserved. It's rather a documentation problem. There's no simple documentation to onboard newcomers and show them the basics in a principled way. So it looks like a mess, but it isn't.
Yes, there are some parsers around in languages other than elisp. This one seemed to work well when I tried it some time ago: https://github.com/rasendubi/uniorg
I also don't use org-mode anymore, but sometimes I really do miss org-babel-tangle. In contexts where doctests aren't available it can be really helpful for making sure code listings actually work.
A small todo application for mobile that uses org-mode as the database doesn't need to parse fancy org-babel stuff, except maybe that org-mode itself can be hard to parse.
Personally I'm hopeful that org-mode gets some more love outside of Emacs, so here's a list of interesting org-mode projects that aren't pandoc or Emacs related:
- https://github.com/RWejlgaard/org - https://nvim-orgmode.github.io/ - https://github.com/haxscramper/haxorg - github.com/cnglen/windancer - https://braintool.org/
It includes tutorials, ideas, code snippets, etc., shared to make your introduction and customization of Org-mode as easy as possible. Worg is maintained by a group of Worg contributors, and maybe you.
[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/worg-about.html - Worg is a collaborative knowledge database about Org (Emacs org-mode).
I use markdown now, because you have a lot of tools to deal with markdown, while all tools for org-mode are bound to emacs. Which is perfectly fits the emacs philosophy of emacs being an operating system, but it is not for me. It was fun 20 years ago, but now when I'm thinking of tinkering with emacs configuration for hours to get anything done, I feel an impulse to run away.
I think the trick with Emacs and Org is to stick to the basics and then only add features or change your configuration very slowly, as needed. I have been using Emacs non-stop for >20 years and my .emacs is just 20 LOC. It's been shrinking, not growing. My goal is to bring it down towards 0 LOC. I have committed a few things upstream to modernize defaults.
Personally, I think the reputation of Org, Emacs, or Nix being hard and complex is undeserved. It's rather a documentation problem. There's no simple documentation to onboard newcomers and show them the basics in a principled way. So it looks like a mess, but it isn't.