Original author(s) Written in Emacs lisp | Developer(s) Carsten Dominik et al. | |
 | ||
Stable release 9.0.1 / November 19, 2016; 4 months ago (2016-11-19) Repository orgmode.org/cgit.cgi/org-mode.git/ Type Personal information management, Notetaking, Outlining, Literate programming… | ||
Org-mode (also: Org mode; /ˈɔːrɡ moʊd/) is an editing and organizing mode for notes, planning, and authoring in the free software text editor Emacs. The name is used to encompass plain text files ("org files") that include simple marks to indicate levels of a hierarchy (which could be the outline of an essay, a topic list with subtopics, nested computer code, ...), and an editor with functions that can read the markup and manipulate hierarchy elements (expand/hide elements, move blocks of elements, check off to-do list items, ...).
Contents
Org-mode was created by Carsten Dominik in 2003, originally to organize his life and work, and since the first release numerous users and developers have contributed to this free software package, Emacs includes Org-mode as a major mode. Bastien Guerry is the current maintainer, in cooperation with an active development community. Since its success in Emacs, some other systems have also begun providing functions to work with org files.
System
The Org-mode home page explains that "at its core, Org-mode is a simple outliner for note-taking and list management" The Org system author Carsten Dominik explains that "Org-mode does outlining, note-taking, hyperlinks, spreadsheets, TODO lists, project planning, GTD, HTML and LaTeX authoring, all with plain text files in Emacs."
The Org system is based on plain text files with a simple markup, which makes the files very portable. The Linux Information Project explains that "Plain text is supported by nearly every application program on every operating system".
The system includes a lightweight markup language for plain text files (similar in function to Markdown, reStructuredText, Textile, etc., with a different implementation), allowing lines or sections of plain text to be hierarchically divided, tagged, linked, and so on.
Functionality
This section gives some sample uses for the hierarchical display and editing of plain text.
Integration
Org-mode has some features to export to other formats, and other systems have some features to handle org-mode formats. Further, a full-featured text editor may have functions to handle wikis, personal contacts, email, calendars, and so on; because org-mode is simply plain text, these features could be integrated into org-mode documents as well.
From org-mode, add-on packages export to other markup format such as MediaWiki (org-export-generic, org-export), to flashcard learning systems implementing SuperMemo's algorithms (org-drill, org-learn).
Outside of org-mode editors, org markup is supported by the GitHub code repository, the JIRA issue tracker, Pandoc, and others.
Some of the systems that handle org files include: