Yes, I agree with you. But unfortunately working is the best cooperation pattern we've found so far, the society keeps running smoothly if everyone is working. Maybe AI will change it, maybe not, let's wait and see.
I think the biggest advantage of Org Mode over Markdown is that Org Mode can attach properties to headers. This seems trivial, but it's not. Because of that, you can:
1. Give a header an id and jump to it from anywhere.
2. Attach scheduling information to the header so that you can easily track TODOs and DONEs. I usually further break down a TODO into several sub-TODOs and write something under each one to organize my thoughts, including code blocks, tables, quotes, footnotes, which is impossible in Markdown.
3. You can attach anything else to it, too. I also attach an Anki note ID to it and use Org Mode as an alternative Anki editing environment. Because of the attached note ID, I can easily distinguish whether I want to create a new Anki card (without an ID) or update an existing one (with an ID). That is also hard to implement in Markdown (Strictly speaking, I don't think it's even possible to implement it in Markdown).
My only complaint is that Emacs is the only text editor that fully supports Org Mode. Other editors (e.g. vim, VSCode) support it too, with only to an extent.
Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.
>My only complaint is that Emacs is the only text editor that fully supports Org Mode. Other editors (e.g. vim, VSCode) support it too, with only to an extent.
My concern with org-mode is a superset of that. The only parser that fully supports org-mode is the one in org-mode itself. The ones not built into org-mode (pandoc, org-ruby, etc) all only support a subset of org's features. This makes writing anything to share in org-mode more difficult because you have to restrict yourself to writing in the subset of org-mode that e.g. pandoc supports.
That's why I laughed quietly to myself when I saw that the author had written, "Org mode is standardized". Org-mode is exactly as standardized as Markdown was when Gruber published Markdown.pl. There is one authoritative implementation (org-mode's elisp, Gruber's perl script), and to be "standard", all other implementations need bug-for-bug compatibility with the authoritative version. The only reason org-mode feels more standardized is that, currently, the only practical way to use org-mode is with the original implementation, in emacs. No doubt the original users of Markdown felt the same way, when using markdown.pl to format their blog posts.
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.
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:
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.
> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.
The reliance on Emacs has been mentioned by a fair number of commenters already, but there's also another issue here, I think -- there are a lot of Markdown variants, and while that's usually described as a flaw rather than a feature, the silver lining is that there probably is a Markdown processor that can handle [thing that you want], from citations to cross-references to math formulas. "But then I'm tied to that variant of Markdown" is a valid objection, but it's not one that's really answered by Org Mode.
In practice, some Markdown syntax that started as "non-standard extensions" -- most notably tables and footnotes -- has been widely adopted by most processors. Several processors I know of do have ways to attach labels or other metadata to sections, such as MultiMarkdown's cross-references.
> I usually further break down a TODO into several sub-TODOs and write something under each one to organize my thoughts, including code blocks, tables, quotes, footnotes, which is impossible in Markdown.
This one I'm not actually sure I'm following. You can certainly insert code blocks, tables, quotes, and footnotes under subheadings and even under indented lists.
Org Mode is absolutely better as a task manager and day planner -- but that's not a function of Org Mode's markup syntax, except to the degree the syntax has specific features for supporting tasks and agendas. It's a function of Org Mode being, well, a mode, with a lot of specific functionality in Emacs. For general purpose document markup, it's probably as good as (e.g.) MultiMarkdown, but not better; if you're comfortable with one, there'd be little obvious reason to switch to the other.
I wonder if being Docbook oriented hurt Asciidoc. At one point, I thought everything, even HTML, went through the Docbook toolchain and customizing Docbook is intimidating.
I don't like the reliance on emacs. I do a lot of writing on my phone and tablet, which have limited emacs support. That adds some overhead for my writing, which would distract from the main point (writing).
Instead of org mode, I bought a markdown editor for iOS and use that. Then I sync the markdown files to my computer using iCloud.
Orgzly does the job for Android, same workflow you describe but with org files.
Even has system-wide note capture via system drawer which makes jotting notes and ideas very efficient. Something I need to figure out with rofi + org-capture or similar for desktop!
> Sometimes I also wonder why Org Mode is not as popular as Markdown, the former is far more powerful.
You can replace "Org Mode" with almost every single markup language out there. Markdown was designed from the start as an 80% solution, and RST, asciidoc, &c. are all more powerful than markdown. For interchange, popularity begets popularity, so it would be surprising if the technically best (in isolation) solution won.
My experience with Emacs is bittersweet. On the one hand, org-mode in Emacs is extremely powerful. I use it to schedule TODO items, organize my thoughts, write notes, publish websites, and lots of other things. On the other hand, Emacs drives me crazy from time to time. It's slow, hard to maintain, the environment I set up is fragile, and most of all, it lacks a modern UI. Scrolling pixel by pixel is still impossible in Emacs.
Sometimes I do use VSCode as an alternative, but VSCode only has a rudimentary implementation of org-mode, and the so-called org-mode alternative - markdown - is not nearly as powerful as org-mode.
> pixel-scroll-mode was introduced at or before Emacs version 26.1.
The third-party package "good-scroll" improves on pixel-scroll-mode by adding variable speed. IME, it's necessary in order to prevent flickering from pixel-scroll-mode. The defaults are somewhat conservative, and might not look like "scrolling pixel by pixel" to you, but you can definitely customize it to get what you want.
Thanks. Actually I've tried both the built-in pixel-scroll-mode and good-scroll. None of them gives me the experience of a modern text-editor (e.g. VSCode).
Hmm. I honestly can't tell the difference between the behavior of good-scroll and VS Code (have them both open right now, on Windows). But there must be something that you notice that bugs you that I don't.
Related: My biggest complaint with Emacs is that when you scroll, the cursor moves to keep itself visible on-screen at all times. Modern text editors don't behave this way--it's easy to scroll to a different location to look at something without losing your insertion point.
Has anybody written a patch for Emacs to implement this behavior?
I don't think so, and I think it might involve unreasonable changes to core.
The "Emacs Way" here is to use a command that takes you back to where you were before. If you used tags navigation to get to what you wanted to look at, you could use `pop-tag-mark`, which is on M-, (other modes for getting around, like xref and LSP use the same binding). Or failing that, if you know you're staying in the same buffer, you can `set-mark-command`, scroll to where you want to look, and `exchange-point-and-mark` (and then deactivate the mark with C-g if you were in transient-mark-mode, which most people are these days).
I recognize that all these solutions are not intuitive to someone who expects the cursor position to stay in the same place even if it scrolls offscreen.
Thanks. I was used to doing things 'the Emacs way' many years ago before GUI editors were common but now I go back and forth between Emacs and GUI editors a lot and Emacs seems like the odd duck. Guess I just need to relearn this stuff because the other features Emacs brings to the table (e.g. Magit) are too handy to do without.
I feel the same. VSCode is better than Emacs in lots of aspects, but I cannot leave Emacs for now because Org Mode in Emacs is just too powerful. Although VSCode also has an Org Mode addon, it only has some basic functionalities and hasn't been updated for ages.
Lots of people begin to create new products based on Markdown (e.g. foam, VSCode anki editor, etc.). But in my opinion, Markdown is not as great as Org Mode. For example, Org Mode can set properties for each heading, which is quite useful in some situations. I hope we can have more powerful Org Mode-related addons in VSCode.
I’m not a native English speaker, either. The biggest challenge for me is to write English sentences without grammatical errors. To do that, you need feedbacks that tell you whether your sentences are correct, that’s especially hard when you neither live in an English-speaking country nor have an English-speaking friend. Online language learning forums help a little bit, but they are not enough if you want constant feedbacks.
2) The long sentence starting with "To do that" should be split into two after "correct". As written, the clause that follows is completely standalone and there is no conjunction to connect it to the rest of the sentence.
3) This is more of a style thing, but I would expand the word "that" in "that's especially hard". For example, into "getting this feedback". Why? Because "that" should refer to some concept you already mentioned, but there is nothing in the preceding sentence it can meaningfully point to. What's hard? Needing feedback? No, getting the feedback is hard, but that phrase doesn't appear anywhere, so you have a dangling pointer :)
Same here. I'd recommend tools like Grammarly or something similar (like spell correction on Gmail/GDocs). They at least catch basic errors. Although many incorrect-but-not-right kinds of errors fall through, you'll feel embarrassed much less often.
Me too, algorithms are extremely hard for me at first. It took me a really long time to solve easy problems, and I could only solve 1~2 middle-level problems in one day. But finally, I managed to handle them by getting to know some effective learning strategies, e.g.
1. Explain to yourself how algorithms work, like a teacher teaching his/her students.
2. It's even impossible to explain to yourself when facing some middle-level/hard problems. Then I got another good idea: write everything down on papers. Finally, I found out that it was not that hard to solve these problems.
There are a lot of other learning strategies. In retrospect, I think it's lucky to be an engineer. Although it's hard, tough, brain-racking, I get to know a lot of learning strategies along the road. Sometimes you wonder if others are way smarter than you, but maybe they just know some learning strategies that you don't know, and they never give up.
Well, we need to do something constantly, we human beings cannot be bored, but what you can do to avoid boredom is not only to check your phone, but also do something meaningful, what could make you happy/healthy, like learning/hiking/traveling. The point is, just concentrate on something useful. Life is not just a phone, and for most of the time, checking your phone can bring you nothing but the slight comfort for a second.
Well, we need to do something constantly, we human beings cannot be bored, but what you can do to avoid boredom
Ten years ago or so, I did a meditation retreat. The first two days of silence and having my eyes closed were hell, I craved for music, TV, chatting with people, etc. Somehow the small daily distractions seemed fundamental to surviving.
I was ready to pack up and leave and told the instructor so during the next daily talk. He smiled and said 'ok, we'll make sure that you get refunded'. Somehow, his light and humorful reaction made me realize that my brain had built a monster out of my cravings and that I let it dominate my will completely. After our chat I could more easily see the craving for what it was. During the remainder of the retreat it would sometimes rear its ugly head again, but I could just observe it as 'oh, that's craving again'. It comes and it goes away.
The nice thing was that after those initial two days, I got a lot calmer and my brain clearly started processing things from the past.
I tried Pomodoro before, it did boost my productivity during the work time. But the problem is, I started to hate my work more and more because I knew that I had to be totally focused around 20 minutes or more on my work during that time, and I was not allowed to have a rest until the time was up. It could be exhausting at the end of the day, when I tried it for multiple times.
I'm freelancing, and my goal is usually to work 12 productive Pomodoro's every day, i.e. about six hours of productive work. That really feels like I've extracted all the productivity I have in me for a day, and still leaves plenty of time to rest and do whatever I want. (When I used to work at home I would e.g. go for a run after four or eight Pomodoro's, and continue with the rest afterwards.)
Exactly, it feels like you are now working for the clock. I do think if you can focus for more than 20, don’t break the momentum. Is better to take a bigger break after than to force a break.
