Hi @cyrialize , Hopefully this is an acceptable level of self-promotion. It sounds like my browser extension, BrainTool might be useful in your workflow. It's kindof a bookmark/tab management tool. It syncs to a .org file and allows you to do things like mark tabs as a TODO, which you can then track in org-agenda etc. There's some brief descriptions and videos here:
https://braintool.org/2025/09/16/Browser-Workflows-with-Brai...
Oh wow this looks really awesome! I'll have to check it out.
I unfortunately primarily use Firefox, but still this is great. I've manually tried to keep track of bookmarks via org, but of course I'll always forget to update it.
I've been on this bandwagon for a long time! I proposed org as an interchange format for Productivity and PKM tools several years ago [0]. Org allows me to unify my bookmark manager with the rest of my PKM as well as to-do management in a way that I don't think is possible with markdown.
That said I think that AI is changing things as it becomes best practice to document and define everything in plain text for LLM consumption. Since the default text format is markdown (due to github and PKM tool support) more and more people are exposed to it as the one true markup language. So maybe the boat has sailed and org becomes another example of the better format that doesn't win out. OTOH LLMs slurp up org content just as easily as they do markdown, maybe more so given the richer syntax. So maybe there's still room for both?
Either way I think the losers are going to be Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira etc, maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date.
Like us org folks have been saying all along, just stick with plain text!
> "Either way I think the losers are going to be [...] maybe even wikis, ie all the non standard ways people have been documenting their work to date."
Org mode never touched ConnectedText for me; I'd probably still use it if the tool either had gotten open-sourced and/or taken over by a dedicated team (of professionals). Its pros were user friendlieness, powerful scripting, reliability, having an extremely good search functionality, and a small but dedicated community. In other words some things Org mode still has not. And getting text in and out was trivial.
Sadly, AFAIK, the dev threw in the towel after facing a refactorization of the code. Having single-dev complex applications is very seldom a sign of sustainability (SPOF).
And functioning wikis obviously implement standards; several of them can run on flat-file structures (e. g. TiddlyWiki). Org mode can or could run them as front-end. Et cetera.
I'm sorry. You're starting a totally different topic here.
I tried to emphasize in my article that this is about orgdown, the syntax of Org-mode which itself is an Elisp implementation of a flexible tool.
So whenever you refer to tools like Sharepoint, Confluence, Jira, ... you're discussing tools and not lightweight markup languages and where Markdown has downsides nobody seems to know of which was the goal of my article.
I've been watching this trend toward SDD. Makes sense but it feels like the process pendulum is swinging back toward the pre-agile era of functional specs and design documents. Not quite Big Design Up Front[0] but maybe increasingly working software == comprehensive documentation[1]?
Functional specs and design documents are just programming in a natural language. In the olden days it took a human to "code" that into a programming language, but now that compilers (i.e. LLMs) are getting better at compiling natural language, it might look like you're able to skip a step (to varying degrees of success).
Whereas agile doesn't care what language you build your software in. It's about taking managers out of the picture; encouraging developers to get involved with what are normally considered "managerial" tasks. The 12 Principles goes into more detail about the things developers might need to do if there are no managers.
Behaviour Driven Design, following Test Driven Design practice, can create a living specification. Human readable domain exploration, human-readable criteria, and direct links to the test harness to demonstrate conformance and domain capabilities.
This gives you verifiable set of spec documents (BDD reports for integration tests, acceptance tests, domain requirements, etc with green/red status), to iterate and collaborate on without requiring undue upfront work separated from the actual product. ‘Agile’, JIT, YAGNI-aware, specifications, no waterfall necessary.
You can have small design up front as-well. You write down one or two pages, let the LLM generate code and tests. Keep iterating. If you believe in 100% LLM coded applications, then it makes sense to manage the English input as specifications. Instead of throwing the prompts away, you neatly organize them. Plus you can add additional constraints when the AI does something you don't like.
But I don't trust LLMs to program anything critical, and only do sandbox/tests/demo's. Things where code quality is less important.
Spec driven development is a good idea, but the current implementations are trash because they hand off markdown files to an agent who might as well be wiping its ass with them for all the reproducibilty you get. If you're going to have agents generate specs they should be structured and transformable via code gen in to actual stub code and tests. It's only a little bit more work than unstructured markdown specs, saves a bunch of time in terms of boiler plate generation and gives you very high reproducibility.
Take a look at the CLI subproject of https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/arbiter. It does all this. I am in the process of making a version of the CLI that's standalone with a fully open license, I'm just swamped ATM getting a side hustle ready for No Kings.
Take a look at BrainTool. It's a bookmarks/tabs/todo-manager browser extension that writes to an org-mode syntax text file. Allows you to capture notes, containment hierarchy, to-do state etc and expose it all to your org PKMS. (Disclosure, I'm the developer.)
Yeah, LogSeq is listed in my blog post. At the time of the post, I think they were desktop-only. Now I see they have apps for all the big OSes; desktop and mobile. Very cool!
"Growing support is easing collaboration via org files."
The same month this article was written (4/22) I tried to make the case for org as an interchange format for productivity tools [1] and pointed to most of the same tools supporting org. (Disclosure, my browser extension, BrainTool[2] is listed in the article). I still love the idea of a local-first, plain text model for sharing personal data across productivity apps, but three years on its not clear to me that the momentum has been maintained. Are folks still building new things on top of org?
Post author here... My dream: a grammar or specification for org text. So that someone can make a self-contained parser library (I'm not smart enough). So that others can embed it in all their tools, and so that someone can make an LSP for org text.
IMHO, the integration of org-mode into Emacs is a double-edged sword. Great for me, because I get batteries-included writing support. /However/ terrible for distribution. The source code of the canonical implementation is the specification. Unfortunately, it is hardwired to the Emacs binary. That fact alone makes org text verboten to most of the known universe. Even if that weren't true, the absence of a standard makes it incredibly difficult for outsiders to maintain feature-parity of their own implementations with the canon, and with each other.
You could specify what's vanilla default in the org packages.
For that example, there's a file-local way to specify custom TODO keywords[^0]. Maybe that can get into the standard, but I'd be Ok with with a primitive, vanilla specification for org-mode first as striving to support everything would ensure no projects form around an emacs-free org-mode anytime soon.
Completely agree, on both counts. Users often ask me how they can edit their BrainTool.org file outside the extension. There's no way I can in good conscience point the average knowledge worker toward installing an emacs distro!
FWIW I use orgajs (https://github.com/orgapp/orgajs). Its well-supported and gives me a pretty complete AST. Highly recommend if you're working in JS.
My hacky solution for this when working with others has been using git post-receive/commit hooks to execute the org document (babel, pandoc, emacs html export, etc), so anybody with any editor can, if they understand the format, make changes without having to have emacs.
I heavily abuse commit hooks in my hacky CI/CD pipelines though, so ymmv.
I have been using org-mode for nearly two decades. Org-mode itself has existed for 22 years (beating markdown by 1 year!). For something as important as an archival format, I wouldn't base my decisions on the vagaries of the latest trends.
org is timeless for sure! Personally I've been using emacs since the 80's. But as the developer of a personal knowledge management application I was hoping that an ecosystem of specialized, easy to use, tools based on org would emerge.
BrainTool is a browser extension for managing tabs and bookmarks. It saves your data in an org file. One feature is to allow an item to be marked as a TODO. For me personally I then integrate my BrainTool.org file into my overall org workflow and see that TODO in my org-agenda. But ideally a naive BrainTool user would be able to see that task in a tool like Todoist or whatever.
For a while there it seemed like there was some momentum!
Totally agree with this, having been in the situation multiple times. It's hard to get credit and additional resources for problems avoided and emergencies that don't happen, especially in a room full of excitable extroverted executives.
While there aren't visibility-boosting features, don't downplay SEO on the app stores. That is, if your's is the kind of extension that people will be searching for when looking the solve their problem. The Chrome store also shows a bunch of 'related' extensions at the bottom of every listing. It can't hurt to show up there.
Also, since you don't mention it, list on the Edge Add-ons store. My user count over there is ~40% of the Chrome store number.
I think it's like marketing any other type of software or service online - SEO, find user communities, influencers, ads/paid promotions etc etc. In my case I got lucky and impressed a tech writer who gave BrainTool a write up on ZDNet and gave me a jumpstart on the first 2K+ downloads. I wrote about the experience here:
I've heard good things about ExtensionPay[1]. It didn't have what I needed at the time so I hand rolled my own on Firebase using a Stripe integration component[2]. As you probably know the issue with extensions is that the whole codebase is exposed so you need some kind of back end if you're handling payments and associated secret stores.
