from Hacker News

Org-mode parser in Rust

by sodiumjoe on 4/14/19, 4:39 PM with 82 comments

• by amenod on 4/14/19, 6:53 PM

  Genuinly curious:

  > Why reinventing the wheel when we can just copy it! This project takes the only surefire way to get it right - use the original elisp parser implementation as a blueprint!

  Emacs Lisp code is under GPLv3 license, is it OK to rewrite it in another language (using original code as blueprint) and publish it under MIT?

• by peatmoss on 4/14/19, 5:58 PM

  I love org-mode as a format and as a literate / notebook programming environment. And I love emacs.

  But, I think it’s great that more people are looking at org-mode outside emacs. I’d love to see alternative tool chains that push the capabilities and open more people to its magic.

• by kibwen on 4/14/19, 5:41 PM

  The author is in the following thread if anyone would like to ask questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/bcz7d4/orgrs_org_pars...

• by zebproj on 4/14/19, 9:43 PM

  I've been using org and org-mode for literate programming for the past few months. org-mode provides a really nice interactive environment suitable for literate programming, but tangling code is hilariously slow, to the point where several people [0] (including myself [1]), have written org tanglers. It'd be interesting to see benchmarks against the original org-mode implementation.

  [0] https://github.com/orgtangle

  [1] https://github.com/OrgTangle/Worgle

• by iBelieve on 4/14/19, 6:20 PM

  This is great to see. I started my own org-mode library for Rust at the end of last year (https://github.com/iBelieve/orgmode-rs), with the goal of building a desktop or web app for org-mode, but haven't had much time to work on it.

• by Lord_Nightmare on 4/15/19, 4:15 AM

  I was excited, but the fact that this is (well, WAS) violating the GPL by being MIT licensed was a major downer. I'd be very interested in an org-mode parser which is NOT GPL-licensed, specifically because it is effectively impossible to integrate GPL code as a plugin (unless your editor is also GPL), which was one of the stated goals of this project.

  Hence, someone would have to properly clean-room reverse-engineer org-mode in order to achieve 100% compatibility, or make a somewhat-incompatible implementation based on the reference docs instead.

  As I understand it, Markdown has significant limitations which org-mode doesn't have, but is under a 3BSD-style license. (It also has issues of x+1 slightly incompatible implementations)

• by westoncb on 4/15/19, 12:45 AM

  I often see things about org-mode showing up on here, and I get the basic idea but I'd like to see a more in depth explanation of why it's so great.

  Anyone have a recommendation for an article or video or something on the subject?

• by angleofrepose on 4/14/19, 7:13 PM

  What sense does it make to have org mode outside of emacs? I think the entire power of the system would be that it explicitly lives within emacs. From the repo:

  > Org is probably the best and most complete plain text organizational system known to mankind. It has countless applications like authoring, publishing, task and time tracking, journal, blog, agenda, wiki etc...

  Yes, absolutely.

  > Unfortunately Org was originally developed for Emacs and therefore available only inside Emacs. It is a huge limiting factor for Org's development and popularization. Because of that it is not as popular outside of Emacs community as it should be.

  "Unfortunately"? It is a dynamic tool, I don't understand what it would mean for it available outside of emacs except for if that were also a dynamic tool. Are you going to create a standalone dynamic org mode application? It seems better to make a "stripped down" emacs that only has org mode and literate programming features so as to not have as steep a learning curve as the entirety of emacs all at once. What other reason is there for this work except for avoiding the learning curve of emacs? Emacs has got to be one of the most configurable pieces of software outside of Operating Systems(maybe?) in existence.

  Org mode is powerful because it is a plaintext system that gives hooks for emacs abilities like transformation (faces, folding, tagging/searching, agenda features) and execution of code with literate programming, and passing values around between code blocks and so on.

  Why would this want to live outside of emacs? I do think the recently (and again two years ago) extremely popular post on org mode's markup language absolutely misses this point[1]. This post is also linked to from the repo.

  I'd love to learn about what I'm missing here, and would love to get some answers to my questions or responses to my assumptions! I'm very interested in your roadmap and design decisions, I think your external links (except for that article) are fantastic. I will follow the project for sure.

  I just think there is some mental disconnect with how org mode is represented and discussed on hn, and those discussions almost all seem to miss the majority of org mode abilities that absolutely depend on living in the style of environment that emacs provides. From reading the top discussions here, one might think org mode is in competition for the same space as markdown while that is not even remotely true [2].

  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622019

  [2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=org%20mode&sort=byPopularity&p...

  PS: I am trying to do a more thorough review of the discussion about org mode on hn, and I will be taking actual notes and comment links down to better explain my ideas here rather that just general takeaways. Thanks for bearing with me, or letting me know if you disagree.

• by Ideabile on 4/14/19, 11:23 PM

  Thanks for have making this! Not long ago, I was dreaming about getting an embeddable version with Rust with DSL.

  And since a couple of days I'm getting more posts about org-mode. I think are nice foundations to continue on.

• by burtonator on 4/15/19, 12:57 AM

  "Org-mode parser in Rust"

  ... I think this is the nerdiest title I've ever seen posted to HN :)

• by eclipseo76 on 4/14/19, 6:26 PM

  Now please write an AsciiDoc parser pretty please. I'd like to use it with a static site generator in Rust.