Mit der Auskopplung des Emacs Org-mode in die Syntax der vereinfachten Auszeichnungssprache Orgdown, soll ein besserer Standard als Markdown gesetzt werden. Was Orgdown ist und ob das mit dem neuen St...

You can create MindMap diagrams using PlantUML. This could be useful for early inception of user requirements.

If you were paying attention to my response to Watts Martin’s post on Markdown, you probably concluded that Karl Voit is not a fan of Markdown. I’ve been following Voit’s views on light weight markup languages and personal information management for a long time and have a lot of respect for his views. I was, therefore, delighted to see his long and detailed post on why he thinks Markdown is a disaster. He says, contra Martin, that the plethora of Markdown dialects really is a significant problem and, more importantly, represents a trap for the user. His post spends a long time on that issue so you should see his post for the details. One of the claims in my response to Martin and elsewhere is that Org mode markup syntax—what Voit calls Orgdown—and Markdown are essentially the same and differ in only trivial ways. Voit rejects this completely. His post spends a long time discussing that and why he thinks that Markdown syntax is _much_ worse than Org mode’s. Read his arguments and see what you think. I agree that the many different markups for accomplishing the same output _is_ a problem and, for the most part, I agree with him that some aspects of Markdown design are suboptimal but I don’t think fatally so. For example, rather than having `*` and `_` do the same thing it would be better to have one for bold and one for italics similar to what Org mode does. Still, all-in-all, I stand by my belief that the syntax of the two markups differ only trivially. To be sure, I agree that Org mode syntax is superior and that the Org mode environment is far and away better than Markdown’s. The only remaining question is what to do if you aren’t an Emacs user or if you have collaboration issues. Voit says there are plenty of tools for dealing with Org mode documents that don’t involve Emacs but even though I’d love this to be true, I still think that as a practical matter if you’re going to write Org documents you really need to be using Emacs. Even Voit agrees that Emacs provides the best environment but we differ on whether non-Emacs Org mode is practical. My view: possible, yes but not practical. Guys like Voit can and do make it work for them but I doubt it will see widespread adoption.

I've reignited Journelly, my note-taking/journaling project. The iOS app is coming along nicely. I've been using Journelly daily. The best I can desc...