Also, it's kind of right there in the name. "Org Mode". It's not just a markup format, it's an emacs mode.

My org files quickly accumulate custom elisp snippets for automating small one-off things like rendering embedded dot with Graphviz and displaying them inline. I don't think I'm alone in that. Unfortunately, that creates a situation where, whenever I try to work with org files in other editors, there's a certain "it's like opening Photoshop files in MS Paint" aspect to the experience. Too many things that I've come to take for granted about how I'd interact with and edit these files no longer works.

Markdown, on the other hand, is just a markup format. It has lots of dialects, but it isn't really owned by anyone. That creates a very different power structure: Markdown editors are free to just try to make a good Markdown editing/viewing experience, whatever that means to that particular editor's developer. There's no looming and inevitably unfavorable comparison to the format's native editor to have to contend with.

Markdown supports HTML (with JS), and HTML/JS is quite powerful. I can make complex computations and drawings with JS libraries, then present them nicely with custom CSS. Some markdown editors supports embedded HTML/JS in preview, which makes them easy to use as IDE. My favorite editor is Marker[0].

I suspect that I can write embedable applications in JS and load them as libraries in Markdown to perform advanced stunts, like in Org mode.

[0]: https://github.com/fabiocolacio/Marker

Would be funny if someone wrote a language server for org mode in elisp on top of emacs and offered all of its functionality to the other editors.

But jokes aside, is there something that doesn't let us implement a language server for org mode?

I have this idea attempted. It can work if enough engineering is put into it.

Correction: I have seen it attempted.

Except it's not just a markup format. When connecting it to the agenda system in emacs you end up with emacs lisp snippets (easily, not always) in your org files. And that's just part of the basic usage:

  %%(org-anniversary 2021 11 18) It's been %d years since the 50,000th org-mode thread on HN.

Or with org-babel you can have different blocks of code interact with and reference each other:

https://orgmode.org/manual/Environment-of-a-Code-Block.html

That's a lot more than markup at this point since you can run those inside of org-mode.

Completely agree. I think there's a continuity between the misconception of Org Mode as being just being another markup format and Emacs being just another text editor.

Emacs is the operating system. Viper is the text editor.

/s

Thanks for knocking some cobwebs off the old neural pathways. I’d totally forgotten about viper mode.