Re: Help requested: Support for basic Org mode support in tools outside of Emacs

[M . ‘quintus’ Gülker]

Am 04. August 2021 um 12:57 Uhr +0200 schrieb Karl Voit:
> My focus is on Emacs-independent tools, emphasizing the argument
> that Org mode is not Emacs-only and its syntax does have
> applications outside of Emacs as well because it is a well-defined
> syntax in the sense of
> https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/

It is an interesting post, thank you for sharing. Indeed, a list of
non-Emacs org tools would benefit org's popularity as a markup
language. Good luck with building one!

The problem with the approach you describe in this article is that the
org markup is not really separatable from org as a part of Emacs. By
setting some variables, the user is able to change the org syntax
itself and tailor it to his personal taste. The org manual even gives
a simple example for adding new TODO states at § 5.2.1:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Workflow-states.html

While this might not fall under the restriction to basic facilities,
it is perfectly possible to redefine variables that define the basic
syntax as well. If one does not like stars for heading prefixes,
it is possible change `org-heading-regexp' to whatever taste is at
hand. A more practical example (which I use myself) is adding new link
types as explained in § A.3 of the manual:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Adding-Hyperlink-Types.html

I recall from a discussion on this mailing list which I cannot seem to
find at the moment that the inseparability of org syntax and org Emacs
tooling is official position of the org developers. I think it was in
the context of registering a MIME type for org. In any case, org as a
syntax is a moving target, as the recent additions in form of
citations have shown (see 
https://blog.tecosaur.com/tmio/2021-07-31-citations.html).

Note I am not at all opposed to your quest. In fact, I would love to
have more widespread support for org so that it is easier for me to
collaborate with non-Emacs users on plain text documents. I just
wanted to point out difficulties of spreading org in the world outside
Emacs, which may be hard hard to imagine, but does exist. As an aside,
I hope that pandoc will receive support for org's new citation syntax
soon.

  -quintus

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