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Add to SafariWhen comparing hackmd.io vs Emacs Org-mode, the Slant community recommends Emacs Org-mode for most people. In the question“What are the best cross-platform writing apps?” Emacs Org-mode is ranked 1st while hackmd.io is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Emacs Org-mode is:
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Collaborative
Allows multiple people to edit the same note in realtime.
Pro Automatic "table of content"
Automatically generates a "table of content" of your headlines.
Pro Supports revisions
Allows you to go back in time to a previous version of your document.
Pro Edit and view-only permission settings
Note: Enterprise Edition has even more refined permissions, but the permissions in the non-enterprise edition are pretty powerful.
Pro Shortcuts from Sublime Text, Emacs, and Vim
Pro Tag support
This is truly helpful for organizing your documents.
Pro Can create slide-shows
Supports creating slide-shows in markdown.
Pro Online
It's multi-platform (works well on smartphones) and there is no need to install anything.
Pro Math support
Use LaTeX seamlessly within the editor.
Pro Dark and white theme
Perfect for working at night.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Book mode view
This is really helpful for longer documents. Or even "books." This is also super helpful for journaling activities and the like.
Pro Available as a web service
HackMD service can be downloaded and installed in custom servers.
Pro Cross platform
Is available as desktop app.
Pro Dropbox import and export
Pro Extended markdown syntax
Adds supports for embeddings from Youtube, Vimeo, Speakerdeck, GitHub gist etc; and even creating UML diagrams, Graphviz graphs, Timing charts, and even Music notes! and alerts and comments boxes and emojis.
Pro Open source
HackMD Core's source is available on GitHub.
Pro Free
You can subscribe to it for more features.
Pro Github Gist import and export
People who subscribe can push and pull unlimited.
Pro Google Drive import and export
Pro Ultimate flexibility
This app's flexibility is based on its minimalist approach, giving the user near-infinite freedom.
Pro Absolutely free
Emacs with Org-mode is free as in beer and free as in speech – that is, it costs nothing and it’s totally open source.
Pro Files are usable anywhere at anytime
Users are not tied to one service provider, program, platform, or database engine.
Pro Incredibly extensible
There are many plug-ins for Org-mode, including Org-habits and Org-notify. If Org-mode lacks some piece of functionality, it is very easy to add it.
Pro Agenda views
Pro Excellent unofficial Android app (orgzly)
Pro Offline support
Pro Efficient features for deadline organization
Pro Supports plaintext spreadsheets
Pro There are a lot of extensions, for exporting to html, bootstrap, js-reveal and much more
Pro Quickly add rich text
Cons
Con Custom grammar and spell checker
It does not work well in French (and probably other languages).
Con Not as beautiful as StackEdit
Con Cannot organize notes
Doesn't have the ability to organize notes or create notebooks.
Con Slow servers / problem with online / offline switching
Servers can be slow / down for a few seconds preventing from working on the documents currently being edited.
Con No PDF export support
Con Tries to be smart
It guesses what you want to do and tries to help, often in a wrong and annoying way, for example it when working with list items. Ironically Markdown was built to solve those problems (you format yourself with simple codes and it just works).
Con Unintuitive user interface
The key combinations are unintuitive and difficult to remember. This is probably because there are a lot of hidden "modes" depending on where the cursor is. Actions aren't paired with reversing actions like in other todo apps. For example, hitting shift-tab does NOT reverse the effect of hitting tab.
Con Android app isn't very good
There are several user-created apps for Android, but none seem to offer the same level of functionality as other to-do apps.
Con Not really cross platform
Although it is possible to get a lot of it working, no all in one, sync included, out of the box solution is available for mobile devices.
Con By default, a hard-to-read display
The default way of writing an outline or checklist creates a very messy wall of text that's difficult to read with no vertical spacing. You can manually add vertical spacing, but the Org operations don't preserve it. There are pretty-display modes, but you need to remember how to enable them, etc. etc.
