Before org-mode, I was always downloading different software to manage tasks and notes. The tool churn was very degrading to my productivity but I feel that commercial interests would keep turning the churn machine: new UI changes, enshitification, monthly subscriptions, etc.
It's such a refreshing feeling, sitting back, and feeling assured that for the next presumably 25 years of my career, and perhaps for the rest of my life, I can still be using org-mode, and it will always work as I learned it, but it's flexible enough to easily implement extensions.
It has ingrained itself so deeply into my muscle memory that I built out a whole website builder [1] and extended the language to support all kinds of nice QoL things for my website [2].
Something that as the other commenter here noted—I can rely on orgmode for many decades to come.
[1] https://github.com/thecsw/darkness [2] https://sandyuraz.com
You can start a "document" at any place in the org hierachy. I would rather prefer a distintion between these two concepts.
is very far away from perfection
With regards to your 80% claim, do you happen to know an extension that works well with pasting images from clipboard?
Over the years, my professional note taking has become extremely reliant on quickly pasting images (most often screenshots from papers or quick-and-dirty plots I made myself) from clipboard directly into the notes. The friction of doing this in vanilla org-mode is the only reason I'm not doing everything in org-mode.
Maybe because I am a vim user instead of 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.
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.
And you can insert snippets of code into your notes, like
#+BEGIN_SRC shell
ls | wc -l
find . -type f -name "*foo*"
#+END_SRC
You can even augment orgmode with elisp code if you are so inclined.
Combined with org-agenda you also unlock a calendar with recurring events, task priorities and more.
Markdown doesn't have a built in concept of todo or tag or scheduled event, for instance. It wasn't built for that.
I hate emacs but orgmode is still the file format which contains all of the primitives I need for my notes which looks like it will have the most staying power. I hope to be able to edit the same files in 2035 using whatever brain-connection device everybody is using in the future that I used in 2015 running on a netbook with 1GB of RAM.
Markdown files from the note taking flavor of today will have to be migrated somehow.
First, you have the calendar, but it’s not just a date picker, it’s also shows holidays and other markers.
Then you have the capture (quick entry) where you have the full power of emacs environment plus lisp language to code anything you want. Emacs have other applications like a file manager, mail readers, document readers…, and you can capture the context as well as the note itself.
Then, there’s the agenda, which is fully customizable with a mix of options and code.
And there’s the exporters. Notice that emacs have support for most of the format, so it’s more like an handover to some other parts of emacs. But you don’t merely transform the document from org to html as an example. You extract the html from the org structure as you can filter sections out. Also a lot of options there (and code)
And code blocks (named babel). That you can execute.
So org can be a static document format or a dynamic environment. And all of that because of emacs as the buffer concept is very fluid. In emacs there are only buffers. Each buffer is assigned a major mode which is just a set of functions that does stuff on the buffer text. And you have the minor modes (more functions) that are more like plugins. And you’re free to hack on them. It’s just that the default set looks like a text editor.
But org-mode is inside Emacs, and Emacs is (can be) also your email client. So your notes can link to emails. Emacs is also your calendar. So your notes can link to events.
You can extend this to almost anything if you like Emacs enough. Your notes link to source code files (or your notes contain code, which can be executed from your notes). Emacs is also your git front end, so you could link to commits.
Orgmode includes agendas and whatnot in addition to the markup; any Org implementation somewhere else would need to include those.
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.
Sounds like a replication of Unix inside an editor if you ask me.
Everything is configured in the same language, uses mostly the same keybinds, and can easily be integrated with other apps of the framework.
more tooling would be good though, especially command line tools to get data in and out.
2. it's very very good and having access to it is enough reason for some people to become emacs users, much like magit
Everything else happens in vim/nvim or zed.
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.
I got quite a few users who either come from Markdown or simply don't care about the internal implementation. Here's a wonderful writeup by a user https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
ps. Markdown is also coming to Journelly https://xenodium.com/markdown-is-coming-to-journelly
edit: My other org-based iOS apps
- Flat Habits (habits tracker): https://flathabits.com
- Plain Org (general purpose org viewer/editor): https://plainorg.com
- Scratch (a scratch buffer): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scratch/id1671420139
Emacs is a universal lisp environment, and org-mode is a lightweight markup language that works well with it.
You can port the markup language, but it's a heavy lift to port the lisp way of thinking to another language.
I started an implementation in javascript that I integrated in an obsidian plugin [0]. But the plugin has a long way to go before reaching feature parity with emacs orgmode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdgpb0TeQo
If you are a Lisp programmer, you can OFC use ob-lisp with it (and maybe there's ob-elisp to learn Elisp in a literate way).
This is like a Jupyter netbook, with steroids. Org Babel:
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
Supported languages:
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/languages/index.h...
Though a downside is that you end up curating a workflow that is so tailored to you that it seems weird from the outside, if it ever leaks, i.e. weird notation in git commit messages. That's due to sprinkling implicit and explicit "buttons" (pieces of text roughtly) throughout text (source code or otherwise).
- Organize notes in org-mode is much quicker - The best support for lists (and I do list most of the times) - Tags and properties - Perfect integration with agenda - Great TODOs support - Code blocks with highlights, execution and results
Not sure if it can execute code blocks tho.
I am VERY interested in Obsidian, which seems like it could definitely support an org-like system. It's _almost_ there as far as my own use cases are concerned, and the seamless sync to mobile is really enticing.
But goddammit, my fingers now know how to move through org buffers pretty well, and Obsidian lags on that front, so I may be stuck. ;)
hodanli•5h ago
account-5•5h ago
innocentoldguy•4h ago
Why not Notion or Joplin? I like Logseq's outline format better than Joplin's long-form note taking format, and I just don't like Notion at all for purely subjective reasons.
jcynix•4h ago
Joplin is fine, especially for shared note keeping. We store its notes on a private WebDAV server and everyone in the family can access these notes from their laptops or mobile devices.
But the editing capabilities of Joplin are dismal. Try to swap lines (on a smartphone, no mouse), change the same term in a number of notes, or do some more complex editing operations. These are easily done in emacs/orgmode, even on a smartphone or tablet ... ,at least with emacs running in Termux under Android.
solarkraft•2h ago
Logseq is an outliner (though it does have a document mode), which means a deep interaction with the document‘s hierarchy: You can zoom into blocks, collapse them (not ephemerally, it’s saved in the document) and link to them.
I’d probably use Obsidian if it had those features (since Logseq is still as buggy as it was years ago), but the last time I checked it did not.