organ

Org-mode the application depends on Emacs (it's written in Emacs Lisp) but that doesn't mean we need to. To solve the issue of interoperability between different systems, we are developing a tool called organ. The purpose of organ is to provide an external API for Org documents that doesn't depend on GNU Emacs.

If we were designing a personal note-taking system, I would argue that we don't need this tool. The problem is it's not personal - we have a much wider intended audience and need to present information in many different ways. This means thinking about hundreds to thousands of documents instead of tens, about processing those documents into a full-text search database, and reducing cost along the way.

Emacs can do all of these things, but do you really want it to?

organ -h

organ v0.0.1 --- org-mode toolbox

  usage: organ [global] <command> [<arg>]

options:
  -l/--level* :  set the log level
  -h/--help* :  print help
  -v/--version* :  print version

commands:
  inspect : inspect an org file
  show : display local org info
  describe : describe local org info
  parse