I have to disagree with this. I will admit there are some things org mode does better than markdown, but there are also things it does worse. And probably the biggest is alluded to in the rest of that sentence: "[the] only downside is that you have to be inside Emacs to fully enjoy."
A while ago, I read a blog post about how orgmode was better than markdown[1], that got me interested enough to try it out with neovim[2] using the nvim-orgmode[3] plugin. Admittedly, some of my issues were bugs or missing features in that plugin. But, at least in my opinion, orgmode is just as flawed as markdown, even in some of the same ways. Some of the issues are:
- like the original markdown it isn't precisely specified so there are ambiguities in the description of the synatax, and the definitive specification is just the emacs implementation.
- while it is more consistent than markdown in some ways, it is also less consistent in other ways
- it is designed for, well, organizational tasks, so while it is well suited for things like todo lists and agendas, it isn't quite as well suited for things like writing a blog post
- probably the one that frustrated me the most is there are cases where it is quite clunky and/or difficult to express something. For example, if you put a "$" in an inline code object, in some cases that will be parsed as the start of LaTeX inline math object, especially if you have two "$"s. And from what I can tell, the standard way to work around that is to use a zero-width space in the right place.
Would I say that org mode is strictly inferior to markdown? No. But I don't think it is strictly superior either.
[1]: I think it may have been https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/ but I'm not sure
[2]: I did use emacs for a few years, and still have a few emacs-like keybindings, but neovim is my preferred editor now.
https://ahungry.com/blog/2013-04-01-blogging-with-org-mode.h...
find . -name '*.md' -type f -exec sh -c '
for file do
out="docs/${file#./}"
out="${out%.md}.html"
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"
pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$file" -o "$out"
done As a long-time Emacs user, I also prefer Markdown (and by a wide margin). I have tried so many times over the years, even going all in for a time Beorg on iOS. But I always come back to Markdown.
Part of it is that I just prefer the Markdown syntax to everything else, but the other part is that I just don't care to use much of the (admittedly super cool) machinery around org, such as task capture, calendars, etc.
Yeah WordPress is a security nightmare, but Ghost's editor sucks and there's no viable open-source alternatives with modern security and features.
I've been subscribed to a mailing list for many years, of which perhaps half I actively participated in the mailing list. Almost the entire time I used alpine, a terminal mail client, hosted on a remote server, getting its mail from and sending it through gmail. A stupid setup, perhaps, but it was productive, and I wrote. Since giving up that setup (I wiped and repurposed the server) and trying to use gmail's web interface or Mac's mail application, I've been silent. So, I understand the author's desire for a setup that might seem arcane or byzantine: sometimes there's something about such a system that is comfortable and keeps you writing.
The whole export, pipeline, publish, etc is precisely so they can continue to write just words. Once you've got a setup you like, you stop fiddling and just type.
My own org mode flow has been stable for almost 7 years. I just add an entry to my org mode file, and with a few commands (or recipe), have it up on the site.
https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/03/800th-blog-post-wr...