[jameshart]

Sure.

And driving on the left is one of the most reasonable sides of the road to drive on, but in a country where everyone drives on the right, it’s good to accept that, though driving on the left offers just as many advantages, nonetheless you shouldn’t insist on continuing to do so.

Markdown is also one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text, and it has won sufficient share that it should be your default choice for lightweight markup, no matter how reasonable org-mode is.

[babarock]

Are you suggesting I should pick the markup format for my private files according to the perceived popularity of another format?

I'm not sure what's your point. Are you telling people who use org-mode that they shouldn't?

[crazygringo]

If you think you'll ever want to use third-party tools to process that markup, or if some of your private files will transform into public files at some point, then yes, considering popularity makes a lot of sense.

If they're just text files you edit raw that will never interact with anything else but your text editor, then of course popularity doesn't matter at all. But in my experience, my use cases tend to expand over time.

The article even talks about org mode's interoperability, mainly about the fact that pandoc supports it. And then bizarrely ignores the fact that it has much less ecosystem support than Markdown. So this is very much a subject the article itself brings up, and something that therefore also deserves to be critiqued.

[jameshart]

No? I’m pushing back against advocacy for broader adoption of org mode beyond personal file markup though, which is what I feel like this piece is arguing.

> note that this is not about Emacs at all. This is about Org mode syntax and its advantages even when used outside of Emacs.

[tialaramex]

One of the advantages of "going with the flow" when you can is that you benefit from numbers. You're a market of one, but by "going with the flow" the total market is huge.

Even if for me personally 185V mains power would be better, I can't buy gear for 185V, none of the electricians around here know how to work with it, the cables and sockets and everything else are defined around the prevailing systems at 220-250V here.

Maybe in my kitchen a 520mm dishwasher would be great, but alas dishwashers you can buy here are 600mm or 450mm ("slimeline") models, so 520mm isn't available.

With my poor hearing 14-bit PCM would be absolutely fine, but Sony's "Compact Disc" used 16-bit so that's what everybody uses and records by default.

If you work with Markdown, there are a lot of existing tools which are ready to use. There are tools for Org Mode, but maybe not as many.

There's definitely a sliding scale here. Refusing to use Twitter because it's full of Nazis is very different from refusing to conform to society's expectation that you wear clothes outside for example. There are people willing to spend most of their lives in jail because they refuse to wear clothes but almost all of us don't think that's a principle we care about enough to prioritise (also some of us get cold).

[weslleyskah]

It's a matter of taste, isn't it? It's like LaTeX vs. Typst. You create the environment that works best for you.

[crazygringo]

In my experience, not really. I'd love to use Typst, you have no idea -- but when most journals require you to use their LaTeX template, then my personal taste doesn't really enter into the equation.

[jameshart]

For personal workflows, yes. In your own backyard, you decide what side of the road you drive on.

But when building a product for other people to use - a messaging tool like slack or a commenting platform like GitHub code review…?

[wibbily]

Markdown (subjectively) looks better than Org when it’s plaintext - postfix headers and dashed lists are annoying to parse but they distinguish sections visually. Org by comparison feels like a sea of asterisks.

(I am tickled by the /italic/ syntax though…)

[drob518]

I don’t like using “-“ for bullets and “*” for headings. I do love underlines for underlined text, slash for italics, and asterisks for bold. Other than that, po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Let’s all just pick one and use it consistently. I do agree with the argument that says “Markdown” is meaningless and you’re always forced to ask “What do you mean by that? Which flavor, exactly?” But that happens with anything “lightweight” as it is inevitably extended to deal with more complex demands and becomes more heavyweight in the process.

[iLemming]

> in a country where everyone drives on the right

What if I told you that your analogy breaks completely if you actually consider what Org-mode is. Think of Markdown as a noun (a thing) and Org-mode as a verb (a system that does things). It's like comparing HTML and React components - it's not about "preferable side of the road to drive", we're talking about a complete different mode of transportation - i.e., in a nation where there's infrastructure and roads for cyclists - the rules change from "drive on one side and obey traffic signs..." to be something different. Similar, yet different.

That's what everyone's missing when they try to compare Markdown and Org-mode, while looking at it only through the angle of the markup structure. Markdown is a markup - pure structure, no logic, no state, no content with behavior, no executable source blocks, no embedded logic - and that's the point.

Arguing which one should be "the default choice", is like saying - "just always drive a car, cars are more popular..." - an argument that has no sense whatsoever. If people find Org-mode useful (because it is), well, there's really not much you can do about it, right? Just like you can't tell people to prefer a bike, car, moto or a boat - each has pros and cons and suits different scenarios.

[thayne]

Markdown is worse than other formats in many ways. It has several ambiguities, there are significant variations between implementations, fairly basic features like tables, footnotes, strikethrough, etc. are "extensions" that aren't widely supported.

The only real advantage of markdown is that it is has because more ubiquitous/popular than others, possibly in part because it is relatively easy to implement, as long as you don't care that much about exact compatibility with other implementations.

[jrm4]

This is advice that I would have rolled with pre-Generative AI.

Today, I'm not so sure. I'm actually way used to zim-wiki syntax because that's what I started off with; and already "moving it around" is becoming orders of magnitude easier given the ability to vibe-code tons of little scripts that make it work better with everything else -- and while this might seem a bit counter to the point -- I think one can reasonably rely on the idea of "market share isn't that important anymore compared to 'you, personally, should use the thing that works the best for you because translation will get orders of magnitude easier.'"

[bitwize]

> This is advice that I would have rolled with pre-Generative AI.

/me laughs in pandoc

[noahjk]

I'm surprised nobody else brought it up - what are the pros of left-hand driving? Is it about where the controls are in relation to handedness? Some sort of safety benefit? Better visibility in certain scenarios? And are postal carriers in America who drive LLVs getting the _best_ or the _worst_ of both worlds?

(I like to think about these sorts of things!)

[vishnuharidas]

I've driven both. Drove LHD for more than a decade in India. Now driving in RHD country for 2y now. Personally, I enjoy RHD more because I am right-handed and I get to do things easily with my RH. Otherwise, I realized that safety benefits comes from the driving discipline and not driving on a particular side of the road. Driving on Aus/Japan is way safer than India, despite all of them being LHD.

[bitwize]

As long as we're telling people they should conform to what everyone else uses, why aren't you using Microsoft Word format instead?

[jameshart]

We are talking about choosing a lightweight text markup language. Not choosing a file format for rich text files.

[sorrythanks]

this is so true. i wrote a document in org and i'm still in the hospital after crashing into someone's markdown file

[KarlVoit]

I would ask you to read the article before writing a comment like that.

The whole point of the article is that there is no Markdown. At least not a single instance from it. So when you're referring to Markdown, you're actually referring to a few dozens of slightly different markup languages which are hard to identify and except for a few, very tedious to convert.

In my opinion, this is far from being "reasonable".

Orgdown is explicitly mentioned only as one LML that doesn't come with the listed downsides of Markdown. So if you think that my article tries to convince you to use orgdown instead, you've missed the part where I say that there are many good alternatives of Markdown that do perform better when it comes to real world processes. I just tried to use orgdown as one example among many to state my point by showing an alternative. If you think that orgdown is the only one, you did not read the article carefully enough.

YMMV

[Andrex]

And here I am still carrying the torch for BBCode-alikes...

[skeledrew]

Markdown can be trivially embedded in org-mode, so no need to even miss out on that which "won sufficient share": * Org with md block #+begin_src markdown ..... #+end_src

Markdown may be a winner, but preferring it when org-mode exists is like tying both arms behind my back and trying to do serious things with my feet.

[jameshart]

So like,

   ```org-mode
   * this is org
   ```

?

[drob518]

I’m not sure I see the benefit in that.