orgdown VS commonmark-spec

There are two reasons why I call Org mode standardized.

> I imagine there aren't really various flavors of Org Mode, but that doesn't make it standardized.

All the implementations that call themselves org-mode follow the conventions set by the canonical implementation - the Emacs org-mode. While this may not sound like a good reason to call it standardized, the practical implication is a vast difference from what you get with various markdown flavors. In the latter case, the only way to make sure that your markdown is correct, is to test it with the target implementation.

The second reason is that there is an actual effort to standardize org-mode - called Orgdown [1]. Org-mode is already more or less uniform across implementations. This effort tries to write it down as a reference. Markdown has a similar effort called CommonMark. But if you want to know why it's different, you have to look at the history of why it isn't called 'Standard Markdown'.

[1] https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown

And yes, at least my setup fulfills all of your requirements and much more. For starters, I can add tags, date- and timestamps everywhere, generate "agenda" views for days/weeks/months/... which collects all those time-related items and visualizes them, I can link emails/urls/... and links to files which I tag as well, I can search through search strings or regex to find meta-data on files/notes/events/... and it's all in the most versatile file format possible: plain UTF-8 text files containing simple orgdown syntax, the most beautifully designed lightweight markup language (LML) there is IMHO.

Are you aware of orgdown?

If you want to parse Orgdown files yourself, expect to invest some time in setting up a testing environment.

I think we've got a misunderstanding here. Text files (in this case in orgdown syntax format) are files that contain the information in its original form: characters, words, sentences. So you only need a software that lets you open a text file to view it. If you want to modify the information stored in the text files, you need an application that lets you modify text files. In case of orgdown, you can find options on https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool-Support.org or choose any non-syntax-specific editor of your choice.

So the links are working in Markdown? So Markdown-export is working and your issue starts with the conversion from Markdown to Orgdown?

Well, the difference is that Orgdown, the syntax of Org mode for GNU Emacs is a Lightweight markup language while HTML is a more complex markup language.

Since your notes are in orgdown format, you may use any compatible app that understands to read and probably write orgdown. One of them is GNU Emacs with its org-mode.

I'm thinking of a screen that pops up when booting Emacs that only shows the files I was working on recently in large font (maybe as buttons to click on). The file extension should be hidden, so that I may use it with Orgdown files that have long, descriptive file names (most probably within the same directory).

Edit: this is because GitHub uses cmark-gfm, which is a fork of cmark, which implements the CommonMark variant of markdown. Looks like CommonMark still doesn't support definition lists. :(

BookStack dev here. There's no specific "import" option but you can use the Markdown editor in BookStack and paste in your Markdown content there. The API is essentially just an endpoint to accept the same kind of data, for of course you could automate against the API for batch import. One thing to keep in mind is that BookStack markdown support is fairly tightly scoped to (commonmark + tables + tasklists), although HTML within MD is supported.

>A single canonical reference

https://commonmark.org/

Typically with major new releases of software, when the number left of the dot (e.g. 2.0) increases, it’s shipped as a separate product. Not always, but generally. The Bear folks can speak for themselves but IIRC a lot of the code was refactored / rewritten to support, for example, CommonMark. So, under the hood, it’s literally brand new in some respects.

I use Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) for a lot of things, including my RPG stuff, and there are options for exporting things as PDFs. It’s great for getting organized and doing research, but I would use other tools for long-form writing and layout. What I like about Obsidian though is that everything is done in Markdown (https://commonmark.org) and I can use Pandoc (https://pandoc.org) to transform the source to whatever I need. The caveat is that Obsidian uses a flavor of Markdown with some non-standard extensions, so a pure Markdown editor like Typora (https://typora.io) might be a better choice depending on your needs.

yes, this is the "inventor" of markdown and those rules will always work. Hugo uses something called "Commonmark" which is developed on top of the original markdown. But the original rules will always work too.

Reddit and many other sites support Markdown as an easy way to add emphasis, links, headings, etc. Markdown does not contain any keywords, as it is intended to be language-independent. However, Markdown syntax makes heavy use of square brackets [] and other characters that are difficult to type with an Ukrainian keyboard layout, e.g., the backtick `.

Check out commonmark, that is the Markdown standard supported by numerous converters including pandoc.

And if this is an exercise into that you can use a Markdown spec like CommonMark which is the spec Reddit and a variety of other sites use.