> behind the scenes it is all text parsing. There's no "node" structure.
But I feel like this is one of the strongest things about org mode and something that keeps it really apart from similar tools.
Rather than being forced to think in "org" and manipulate its "objects", you just manipulate text, and if you happen to shape that text into something org recognizes, then it knows how to work with it.
This is amazingly inviting because you never feel "stuck" like you converted something to the wrong type of thing and now can't get it back, or whatever. Instead if you make a mistake you just.. change it to what it should be. It feels very fluid and you learn it quickly because you're not presented with trying to fit your thoughts into someone else's abstractions. You just write what you want and progressively learn more and more how to naturally shape your work into something that org can help you with.
> But I feel like this is one of the strongest things about org mode and something that keeps it really apart from similar tools.
Having manipulated nodes in both Leo and Org mode, the former is one to two orders of magnitude easier (no exaggeration!), and I did not find anything lacking in it compared to text parsing org nodes in elisp.
I'm not arguing that text parsing should not work, or not be available. But there really should be a solid, robust API to do simple things like:
1. Move a node from one place to another.
2. Get the body of the node (sans any children, drawers, and other metadata).
3. Traverse nodes in whatever order you want (DFS, BFS, random, etc).
The underlying implementations of these functions can handle the text parsing. I shouldn't have to do it every time.
But I feel like this is one of the strongest things about org mode and something that keeps it really apart from similar tools.
Rather than being forced to think in "org" and manipulate its "objects", you just manipulate text, and if you happen to shape that text into something org recognizes, then it knows how to work with it.
This is amazingly inviting because you never feel "stuck" like you converted something to the wrong type of thing and now can't get it back, or whatever. Instead if you make a mistake you just.. change it to what it should be. It feels very fluid and you learn it quickly because you're not presented with trying to fit your thoughts into someone else's abstractions. You just write what you want and progressively learn more and more how to naturally shape your work into something that org can help you with.