Timothy Unkert is an Emacs user but prefers to use Markdown over Org-mode. He’s posted a video that describes using Markdown in Emacs. I’m very much a “different strokes for different folks” type of guy as the Hippies used to say so I’m perfectly happy for people to use whatever software works best for them. That said, after watching the video I’m at a loss as to why anyone would prefer to write in Markdown. Sure, sometimes you need to write in Markdown for various reasons but to prefer it? Karl Voit has explained at length why Org-mode markup is the best of class.
The first issue is inserting links. Unlike Org-mode the link isn’t displayed nicely as a link but instead shows the hard to read markup. Worse, Markdown-mode allows you to enter only a single word for the link description. I almost always want more than a single word (as the two links in this post show) so that’s deal breaker for me. Unkert fixes it by editing the actual link markup but that’s lame. I suspect that the real problem here may be configuration issue on Unkert’s machine or at worst an artifact of the Emacs Markdown implementation.
The issue with link display carries over to other text styling. If you want to italicize a word or phrase, you surround it with a single stars but the result is just the word or phrase surrounded by stars unlike Org that will actually produce italics.
Watch the video. Almost every aspect that Unkert demonstrates suffers in comparison to Org-mode. In one sense, this is unfair to Markdown because these problems are specific to the Emacs implementation but if you’re an Emacs user I can’t see any reason, other things being equal, to prefer Markdown to Org-mode.