@kl do the thing! whether it works out or not, you'll learn a bunch of stuff and have fun?

@shapr that's the plan! we'll see what happens.

@Sophistifunk on one level, that makes a lot of sense. it could very easily be some kind of tree structure. on the other hand, the fact that I can open all these org files in Notepad and mostly still deal with them is really valuable. I think it depends on what one uses Org for, really--it contains multitudes.

@kl ...and this is why nothing gets better. Everybody has some plain text tool they don't want to give up, and won't bother replicating the functionality or simply importing/exporting to use it.

@Sophistifunk importing/exporting might cover 80% of the use cases for 20% of the work. i definitely wouldn't rule anything out along those lines... this is all just a brainstorming exercise at this point.

but ultimately I do think "it's just a textfile" is a pro and not a con. it's a very flexible medium.

@Sophistifunk That said, I do think it depends on the use case. For someone who uses Org strictly as a task management tool with an agenda and files in a dedicated place, some other storage format may make more sense.

I use Org for outlining and writing long structured documents, as much or more than I use it for project plans and task lists. I'm using it more as a general purpose outliner than "just" a task list system.

@kl flexibility just isn't the only thing that matters. Parsing / pretty-printing, (un)escaping, and the like don't just waste trillions of dollars of dev and cpu time, they're consistently the most fruitful source of vulns across the entire stack from the silicon up to the web pages.

I dunno the answer, but if we keep doing the same shit we're gonna keep getting the same results.

@kl I wish I knew some way to get us out of this ascii rut :(

@maleza certainly seems like one possibility. I'd have to learn how to use Acme first--i've only dabbled the tiniest bit with 9.