Hi Ihor, Thank you for your email. I have little to add to you analysis and suggestions other than my strong agreement. However, I will give some of my thoughts that lead me to this position. Ultimately, we have a choice. Do we wish to be hostile, or welcoming to interest in Org outside org-mode? Under the “hostile” or “isolationist” option, we might: ⁃ Talk of Org not as a general format, but the /exclusive/ format of org-mode ⁃ Ignore any and all attempts to support .org files outside Emacs Under the “welcoming” option, we might: ⁃ Treat OrgMode as a “brand name” for the Org file format, with org-mode as the reference implementation ⁃ Take reasonable steps (such as those Ihor suggests) to make Org seem relevant/interesting/usable (if inferior) without Emacs ⁃ Encourage efforts to support the format outside Emacs’ org-mode To me, the choice is clear. I think we loose nothing by choosing by welcoming interest in Org outside org-mode, but potentially gain much. As Emacs users, we can think of ourselves as living in a little Emacs bubble (of around 2% of developers if StackOverflow’s developer survey is to be believed). Like Karl Voit, I believe Org holds a lot of value as a markup format in and of itself. The other 98% + some non-developers have good reason in my mind to be curious about Org. I imagine many of us regularly interact with such people. We see this interest manifested not only in extensions for various other editors ([neovim], [atom], [vs code], [sublime], etc.), but also parsers and tools that work with Org like Hugo, Pandoc, and LogSeq. We do not live in a bubble. We all benefit from such efforts. *The more people use Org, in some form, the greater the chance that someone making a new tool will think to support it.* Whatever we may make of it, there is clear interest in Org (to some extent) separately from Emacs. By ignoring that, we only do ourselves and potential future Org / Emacs org-mode users a disservice. People are currently making editor extensions and tools for Emacs outside org-mode. I don’t think this is suddenly going to stop. We might as well help such efforts. Good tools that work with Org are good for Org / org-mode. By providing good clear documentation, and a well-defined grammar, we reduce the risk of different implementations of the syntax and functionality defined by org-mode. We could even provide some for of “implementation roadmap” (linked to the syntax specification) to help developers understand what is required to implement certain functionality (both markup/syntax, and editing features — more on this idea I’ve had in a future email). Karl Voit’s idea of “levels” of Org helps make the task less daunting. Yes, it will take a bit of effort to do this, and in particular to do this well. I feel it would likely be worth it though. From the efforts we’ve seen so far, we have nothing to loose and much we could gain. All the best, Timothy p.s. I see some concerns have been raised about freedom and Org outside Emacs. While the FSF/GNU project are champions of the FOSS movement, there are many other FOSS projects and FOSS editors. To decry helping non-GNU/FSF projects/editors because there are non-free projects/editors seems a bit much. If improving our documentation and being friendlier to non-Emacs users looking at the project website is anti-freedom/breaks FSF rules, what’s making an Emacs build for Windows? [neovim] [atom] [vs code] [sublime]