What lead you to choose that over say obsidian, notion, Joplin, and the many others that pretty much do the same thing?

I have on gripe, that is the mixture between org structure and org document heradings. I know, they are the same, and such a distinction doesn't exist.

You can start a "document" at any place in the org hierachy. I would rather prefer a distintion between these two concepts.

> As of 2025-02, there is no formal Org-mode syntax definition.

is very far away from perfection

First of all "emacs" rather than "eMacs".

But to answer your main question, markdown is used for writing text which can then be converted to HTML, PDF, etc, etc. It's used just to format things. org can be used in that way, and it might feel better/worse depending on what you feel about the choices used for various formatting styles.

However the big gain of org is that you can use it to format dynamic tables, handle todo-lists, have deadlines, recurring tasks, etc, etc. It makes no sense to compare org-files with markdown-files. It's like saying "I use notepad how does Excel help you do more?" - they do different thigns.

Now, much like excel, most people don't do everythign with org, but they can if they want to. It is extraordinarily flexible, and can be extended with custom lisp code if necessary.

I track rental properties with an org-document for each property, and I get per-year profit/loss statements in a neat format with graphs too. You can't do that with markdown.

Org mode offers so much more than just syntax. You can use org files as a calendar, a todo/issue tracker with time accounting, a diary/knowledge base (zettelkasten, org-roam), as a literate programming tool (think jupyter code notebooks but for practically any programming language with org-babel), or a publishing tool (static site generator, latex/pdf export) all at the same time.

To be quite frank, Org mode is a lifestyle which existed long before Notion or Obsidian did. Saying that it has a barrier to entry is a bit of an understatement.

Having said all that, quite ironically, I've migrated over to Obsidian because I started using Intellij more for work, meaning that I don't need Emacs for its other capabilities all that much.

Markdown is a markup tool, i.e. you decorate your text. Orgmode on the other hand is a complete toolbox where you can add tags to notes, filter on these tags, manage calendars, etc. You can enter tables both for formatting and spreadsheet like calculation.

And you can insert snippets of code into your notes, like

    #+BEGIN_SRC shell
       ls | wc -l
      find . -type f -name "*foo*" 
    #+END_SRC

(or javascript, elisp, html, ... instead of shell) where the markup is changed appropriately in these regions.

You can even augment orgmode with elisp code if you are so inclined.

I don't use it anymore but org-babel allows you to execute commands in code blocks. I would use that to build interactive explorations when learning how APIs work for example. I didn't find that nearly as seamless with Markdown.

Combined with org-agenda you also unlock a calendar with recurring events, task priorities and more.

What would be the point? Without emacs all you're left with is another markup language.

There is an implementation for neovim, and some "viewer" applicatrions for android, etc:

https://orgmode.org/tools.html

Basics are easy to replicate, but one of the reasons why org is so useful is because it is tied into the emacs ecosystem, so you can write extensions/configuration tweaks in lisp. You can hookup agenda (calendars), etc, etc, and those things don't really translate so well to external tools.

If you had to write a lisp interpreter, and fake "bare minimum" compatability? At that point you'd be better off just running emacs for real.

orgzly revived for android is pretty great.

more tooling would be good though, especially command line tools to get data in and out.

1. it has, there's various mobile apps and a reimplementation for vim and vscode at least

2. it's very very good and having access to it is enough reason for some people to become emacs users, much like magit

Standalone orgmode implementation is called emacs with org mode. I'm that person that uses emacs solely for orgmode and write code in other editors (vscode/zed/cursor), we also exist

> if orgmode is so good, has it not been implemented outside of emacs

Org Mode is that good, but part of its goodness is due to being in Emacs.

Emacs is not really an editor: it’s an easily user-extensible operating environment with a remarkably shallow learning curve (seriously: one can go years just setting variables before moving up to simple functions and then starting to explore). Having all that power so easily accessible is a part of what makes Org Mode great. It’s what means that each Org Mode user can mold his experience to his needs.