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Why and How I use “Org Mode” for my writing and more (2022)

I find myself telling people that they will have to pry org-mode from my cold dead hands. Which befuddles me. Why, as an ingrate software nerd who has soured on software technology — talk about biting the hand that feeds — do I evince such strong sentiment about a software program?!

But each time I've come away knowing that effort was way lower than having to find, shortlist, pick and learn an entire new tool with its own user interface, opinionated workflow, inevitable workarounds, and maybe incompatible data format (not plain org text). Every other benefit of writing in structured plaintext remains available to me, including fine-grained version control, maximum portability, prose-like legibility, publishing to any other format (PDF, html, tex, odf, asciidoc, as well as various markdown variants). To me, paying the cost of learning org syntax was well worth it because it afforded me access to text structured in one standard format, with better usability, functionality, and historical support than the various markdowns.

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