[HN Gopher] Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, ...
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Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
Author : robenkleene
Score : 230 points
Date : 2025-06-05 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (daringfireball.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (daringfireball.net)
| dhosek wrote:
| Does the appearance of this on the front page mean that DF is no
| longer blacklisted?
| legacynl wrote:
| I've seen this blog linked pretty often actually, so I don't
| know why people think that he was blacklisted
| dang wrote:
| The site was never blacklisted.
| iambateman wrote:
| It makes sense that Markdown is a good tool for a specific
| purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it.
|
| As an aside, I have a dream that Apple Notes could be piped into
| a website as a form of blogging. As it is, I haven't found a way
| to do it...
| nomad41 wrote:
| There's https://alto.so/ that does exactly what you want.
| Zak wrote:
| I like my Markdown notes editor, but I agree it's not the right
| choice for _Apple_ notes because exposing the underlying
| machinery in everyday use is not Apple 's style.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's also not handy to reach the mark-up characters from a
| touch keyboard. And if you are adding backticks and asterisks
| to a markup bar, you might as well just add bold and italics
| to the markup bar.
| Zak wrote:
| This varies a bit by touch keyboard. The standard iPhone
| keyboard is particularly bad at this while the AOSP and
| Google keyboards on Android aren't so bad.
|
| Joplin, the notes app I've been using lately does have a
| markup bar with those features.
| criddell wrote:
| It does feel like a good option for export though (as John
| says in the post).
| jhardy54 wrote:
| I think you want Alto / Montaigne (spelling?). They're both
| made by the same person IIRC.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and
| generalized note taking isn't it."
|
| As someone who enjoys note-taking in Obsidian (by far my
| favorite super-powered markdown editor), I respectfully
| disagree with the premise and conclusion. On the contrary, IME,
| MD isn't single-purpose, and it absolutely can and does serve
| as a first-rate format for note-taking.
| iambateman wrote:
| I'm not trying to take Obsidian away from you...but I'm also
| not trying to sign my Grandma up for Obsidian :D
| msgodel wrote:
| I take my notes in INI format with a lose schema, as I
| accumulate data I tend to move towards something more concrete
| and write tools for it. I think this is the absolute best
| compromise between some kind of formal personal ERP-like (PRP?)
| system and something super loose like Markdown or org mode.
|
| Of course doing this on an iPhone is an absolute nightmare
| because everything has to be blessed by Apple and you can't
| just do one-off ad-hoc automations or usefully compose tooling
| that touches the filesystem. Everything has to be canned and
| sharecropped (at best) so them adding Markdown to the only text
| editor that supports fast, energy efficient background sync is
| a huge deal.
|
| When I had an iPhone I did try doing some server-side
| automation with the SGML-like (can't remember if it was actual
| HTML or not) format notes used. Like most of those sorts of
| things it was a miserable uphill fight to get value out of the
| thing. I've been so happy ever since I've completely given up
| on anything smartphone related.
| jhayward wrote:
| Did you ever test drive the Drafts app? It is remarkably easy
| to build customized workflows, both editing and document
| processing, and is built to be glue between different
| document/message apps.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I'm surprised to see a DF article here. I thought he was black
| listed
| zdw wrote:
| Well, there's this:
| https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
|
| Not sure if it's a blacklist as much as people insta-flagging,
| as happens with a many of the political-adjacent posts.
| legacynl wrote:
| that blog post isn't really convincing.
|
| > Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball
| from Hacker News. It's always short-lived, because for
| reasons I've never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles
| always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their
| front page
|
| It seems to me that he concludes that he's blacklisted
| because the traffic coming from Hacker News is short-lived?
|
| > Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately
| popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate
| with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed
| to me an appropriate number of comments.
|
| So this guy seems to think that he can predict what will be
| popular and what will not? I think he's burying the lede
| here, who cares about being blacklisted, this guy can tell
| the future !
|
| Isn't it much more likely that his posts are just less
| popular, and drive less engagement than he hopes? Most people
| (even very smart people) are bad at meta-cognition, and are
| likely to fall in the trap of reasoning based on (hidden)
| assumptions.
|
| If this guy actually has evidence of being blacklisted/botted
| I would be open to see it, but lack of engament isn't that.
| pronoiac wrote:
| There's a flamewar detector, which triggers when there are far
| more comments than upvotes.
| pvg wrote:
| There is a whole pile of dang comments about this brouhaha, he
| wasn't 'blacklisted', that's just something Gruber imagined
| because his articles don't do all that well on HN these days.
| People become less popular without HNs help.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| I think _he_ thinks he 's blocklisted. I imagine he's very much
| not, and it just happenstance/coincidence.
| kennywinker wrote:
| John Gruber, creator of markdown, wrong about markdown again.
| (https://airsource.co.uk/blog/2014/09/04/markdown-has-been-st...)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| As its author, he's right though. There really shouldn't be a
| standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that
| it wasn't published by its author.
|
| Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a
| few large orgs.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| By this logic, since Ritchie died in 2011, you cannot have a
| "Standard C" because it's not from the author
| zdw wrote:
| Well, there's this: https://commonmark.org
|
| But everyone seems to have their own slightly different
| flavor, either pre- or post- that "standardization".
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Notably, Github's superset:
|
| https://github.github.com/gfm/
| zdw wrote:
| Given Github's owner, it's right out of their Embrace,
| Extend ... playbook.
| rafram wrote:
| That's what they did in the end: https://commonmark.org/
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John
| hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark.
|
| And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all
| validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites,
| but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which
| makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff
| especially thankless.
| zie wrote:
| And then there is GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown), which is
| a bit different from Common Mark.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| At the time of the SM/CM/CommonMark kerfuffle a decade
| ago, Gruber was quite explicit that "X Flavored Markdown"
| was perfectly fine with him-- Atwood even includes the
| relevant podcast snippet:
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-
| commo...
|
| Honestly the whole thing is so ridiculous.
| kennywinker wrote:
| The thing he's wrong about is not the name, it's that
| markdown doesn't need a standard. Markdown absolutely needed
| a spec, and gruber resisted that which is why the spec was
| done without him and has to be confusingly called CommonMark
| instead of just being markdown.
| brookst wrote:
| I mean it's lot like he's touting some fringe thing just
| because he made it. It must be so weird to see markdown become
| the lingua franca of everything from online forums to LLMs.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Alternatively: Giant Apple nerd is bemused to see Apple
| implementing something he created.
| perbu wrote:
| Markdown is the native formatting of large language models. As
| such, support for it will be everywhere in the coming years.
|
| I suspect LLMs, not users, have been the requesting this feature
| at Apple.
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| That's actually a nice perk since I have LLMs summarize or re-
| word my research findings quite often. I'm a disorganized
| person, so they've been a big help with me organizing my work.
|
| I also like that Markdown is being added since it's what I
| typically use for documentation (github, etc). The default
| formatting in notes currently leaves something to be desired...
| benob wrote:
| I wonder how to import markdown into Notes
| runjake wrote:
| There's a couple Apple Shortcuts actions to convert to/from
| Markdown and Rich Text for Notes, but I can't get them to work
| correctly.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion:
|
| _Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183923
| mcdow wrote:
| Kinda stoked for this. Been working on a notes app and apple
| notes is my current daily driver. Apple notes stores the notes in
| a proprietary and opaque format atm. I've been scheming ways to
| break the notes out without luck. Now I can just wait for this
| feature to come out.
| halpow wrote:
| Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they're
| not markdown-exportable?
|
| I haven't used Notes in decades other than to type out
| junk/numbers once every 4 months.
| runjake wrote:
| _> Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they
| 're not markdown-exportable?_
|
| Among other reasons, because the sync experience is second to
| none.
|
| Some of the other reasons:
|
| - Apple Pencil
|
| - Shared notes with friends and family (vacation planning,
| lists, etc)
| mcdow wrote:
| So first of all, I like Apple notes for its simplicity and
| ability to sync with iCloud. I don't really care if it's
| exportable using markdown, I only really care that it is
| exportable. Because I'd like to migrate to the notes app I am
| working on.
| cloverich wrote:
| Was also in your boat, but realized there are various tools to
| export Apple notes as markdown that work reasonably well;
| Obsidian itself recommends one[1]. Meanwhile, I'm impressed
| that Apple notes keeps getting better. It was _almost_ good
| enough for me to abandon my own note taking app. The things
| that slowly drove me nuts were lack of real code formatting and
| lack of image formatting (after they added note linking and
| tagging, the prior issues I had). I'm still surprised how long
| it takes most notes apps to get decent out of the box image
| formatting; few would want to drop an image onto their note and
| have it blown up to take up the full page by default. Just make
| your notes app look like the typical blog by default and _most_
| people will love it[2].
|
| [1]: https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes. [2]: tbf it
| took me quite a bit of work to get there in my own app, and its
| still got bugs
| meindnoch wrote:
| Markdown only makes sense in a non-WYSIWYG context.
| cloverich wrote:
| Its fairly common to use markdown as shortcuts to WYSIWYG
| content - Obsidian and Notion for instance. At a higher level
| at some point if you want a fluid typing experience, you need
| some form of shortcuts, and given markdowns conciseness and
| ubiquity its a good choice as opposed to having a proprietary
| format users need to learn for just your app.
| flambojones wrote:
| +1 - a universal way of doing this via markdown beats
| learning whatever app-specific hotkeys I have to do to make
| an H3 or whatever. I don't have any particular feelings about
| markdown as a format for data, but as a universal set of
| shortcuts, I've found it to be a huge productivity boost.
| germs12 wrote:
| I for one am pumped about this. I hate the styling of notes, but
| love every other aspect of it.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I cannot understand how Apple notes works sometimes.
|
| For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent
| on future lines. Just fighting the tool.
|
| Stuff like this really makes me dislike it. I find syntax
| highlighting with markdown preferable than a WYSIWYG rich text
| editor. I get why people who don't know markdown prefer it, but
| the advantages diminish significantly if you know markdown.
| frantathefranta wrote:
| > For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-
| indent on future lines
|
| I feel like this is why a lot of us use Markdown/Org, because
| this is the most annoying issue in Word to me since 2003. Why
| are the indentation rules so arbitrary?
| cloverich wrote:
| I actually love that this was glossed over by him and most of
| the comments. I used Apple notes daily for years - hundreds or
| maybe thousand+ notes in it. The idea that markdown is easy to
| mess up compared to Apple notes is at best partially true.
| Apple notes messes up too, and in weird ways. The reality is if
| not markdown, its using its own syntax under the hood that is
| certainly not bug free, and will have its own (proprietary)
| bugs to deal with. And since its not markdown, you can't drop
| to raw text to fix it, or even understand it. Which is the
| whole reason more and more apps are moving towards it: You
| don't need to re-invent the wheel for all the standard note
| features, including your own special flavor of bugs. Apple
| notes realistically can't use Markdown in its UI. But if it
| could, having a toggle to flip to it would be lovely,
| especially when their UI gets buggy - there's always a plain
| text work around that's easy to understand, and fully human
| readable on its own.
| vthommeret wrote:
| Indenting and unindenting on iOS is one of my favorite features
| -- you can just swipe right and left on lines to indent and
| unindent.
|
| I've not experienced any issues unindenting but not sure how
| you're doing it?
|
| On macOS, tab and shift-tab always work for me.
| dotdi wrote:
| When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his
| blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text
| editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to
| make.
|
| Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses
| as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big
| advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's
| cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor
| lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant
| "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats.
| Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for
| non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at
| least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you
| know you can take your data with you.
| empath75 wrote:
| It's also great for writing documentation in a plaintext IDE,
| which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption.
| diggan wrote:
| > which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption
|
| That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the
| beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown
| become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub
| itself.
|
| Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs,
| and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue
| comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to
| write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-
| non-technical people to learn Markdown.
| OJFord wrote:
| It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on
| Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just
| tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh
| right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and
| you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got
| closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the
| UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the
| formatting the new version supports, so things like code
| blocks are often broken.
| presbyterian wrote:
| And Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord,
| they're all learning some Markdown
| ummonk wrote:
| Teams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant
| markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of
| italics).
| bsimpson wrote:
| I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is
| almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being
| italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic
| Markdown).
| minimaxir wrote:
| > Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs
|
| It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed
| by GitHub back in the day.
| lblume wrote:
| Was Jekyll ever that popular though?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It certainly populated the "Mark Town to static HTML"
| blogging approach and created the room for its
| successors.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Markdown is like the new WordPerfect for some people, who want
| expressive written paths to format text.
|
| Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility
| (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of
| people don't get anything out of it.
|
| It's also one of those things where the constraints are an
| advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content,
| while many aspects of the mainstream wysiwyg editors are really
| descended from solutions for placing text on paper.
| bombcar wrote:
| Those 80% sometimes DO get something out of it - when the
| resident nerd can fix their broken document because it's
| Markdown or WordPerfect.
|
| Just because _I_ can't fix my car doesn't mean I want an
| unfixable car.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Agreed, but that's the tension.
|
| There's no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the
| complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a
| markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into
| html or ooxml.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Why did you use ChatGPT to answer?
| packetlost wrote:
| idk, a lot of non-devs use chat programs that use (a subset
| of) Markdown for rich text even if they don't know what that
| is.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Its the new BBCode.
| packetlost wrote:
| It's a lot better than BBCode tbh
| Apocryphon wrote:
| You can underline in BBCode.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| You can have colors in BBCode.
| tough wrote:
| You can embed html inside markdown
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it did
| line numbers better than any other software. I'm really
| surprised that MS didn't pick up on that and improve Word's
| line numbering: it's a vital feature for a number of
| professions.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it
| did line numbers better than any other software._
|
| Lawyer here: I loved WordPerfect (for DOS) because of
| Reveal Codes and its easy keystroke macros, which let me
| write an Emacs keyboard emulator for it. (Yes, I eventually
| did one for Microsoft Word for Windows, which I use to this
| day.)
| Tallain wrote:
| That sounds really cool. Have you ever shared it?
| dctoedt wrote:
| I posted the DOS version on CompuServe (!) probably 30
| years ago. I don't think I ever posted the Word for
| Windows version. I switched to a Macbook a dozen years
| ago, and its keyboard works OK for me. (But I use Emacs
| and org-mode far, far more than Word, because these days
| I'm mostly a law professor.)
|
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10383691
| darkteflon wrote:
| Former lawyer here. That most commercial contract work is
| done in Word is a source of major frustration and wasted time
| for many lawyers. Others are simply unaware that there are
| any authoring/editing paradigms that allow one to separate
| the drudgery of getting document formatting just-so, from the
| actual value-additive work.
|
| Unfortunately there's no realistic solution to the lock-in,
| so wrestling with broken paragraph formatting, mismatched
| text sizes, auto-numbering errors, etc at 2am before a client
| deadline remains the norm. One of the most frustrating parts
| of the job.
| eviks wrote:
| 1. That's solved via readily available exports, so no need to
| pay the markup price 2. Same thing + other open formats exist
| eduction wrote:
| Many formats these days are cleartext. Microsoft Office
| documents and LibreOffice documents, to name two collections of
| formats, are both xml based. Not to mention HTML, Latex - the
| list is long. Markdown is fine but overused, to the point where
| even the creator is now warning it's not for everything.
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft)
| GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company
| wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate
| should just use Markdown.
|
| Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that
| software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have
| to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be
| a barrier to capturing and communicating institutional
| knowledge.
|
| I also tell people that, if you're new to Markdown, even a
| plain text approximation that doesn't quite format correctly is
| strongly encouraged, so long as they capture the info somewhere
| accessible. I'll even offer to cheerfully fix the missing/bad
| Markdown, so that we have working docs and people can learn the
| very few parts of Markdown they missed; it's really not much.
|
| (I personally have heavily used many much-much better technical
| documentation systems, and helped develop a WYSIWYG-ish SGML-
| based one professionally, but just using Markdown is a no-
| brainer right now. There are much more important things I want
| people learning and doing, than N different ways of minimally
| formatting documentation in N different places.)
| diggan wrote:
| Isn't it a bit early to have thoughts about something we don't
| know the UI/UX of? Could be that "Markdown support" is just
| "Import/Export as Markdown", or even just export. Or it could be
| a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor.
|
| The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which
| seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10%
| of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation
| that doesn't seem like it'll happen?
| layer8 wrote:
| Notes is already a WYSIWYG editor, with a feature-set exceeding
| that of plain Markdown (handwritten notes, math formulas and
| plots, colored highlighting, etc.). In the general case,
| Markdown export and re-import would likely be lossy, or would
| have to use HTML elements for non-Markdown features. The main
| question IMO is if they'll add Markdown source visualization
| and source editing, in addition to export/import. It could
| conceivably even just be export, without import.
| mechanicalpulse wrote:
| Gruber is famously protective of the original Markdown
| specification and his specific use case. He's reacting to
| others' expectations and clarifying his position that a
| "Markdown editor" is a bit of an oxymoron. He supports that
| position by reiterating his inspiration for creating the
| format.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I understand his point, but I disagree with it. Markdown
| wasn't invented for the purposes we use it for today, true.
| And yet the most popular programming editor today is a
| website running inside a modified browser, themed with CSS
| and extended with JavaScript.
|
| We have a tendency, as a group, to push things beyond their
| original intent.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems sort of odd to have an "export to markdown" command.
| Markdown is nice... because it is sort of like a normal markup
| language, but easier to write, right? But exporting is
| specifically the one case where markdown's strength doesn't
| matter. The computer can type, like, real fast and can output
| verbose and niche syntax easily.
|
| Why not export to the best format, LaTeX? I don't think anyone
| could argue that Markdown is better than LaTeX as long as you
| don't actually have to write it.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| I'd love to see Markdown added to Apple Messages.
|
| I'm constantly sending URLs to people, like
| https://somesite.com/login. The point of these links is usually
| that people _read_ them and understand them.
|
| But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph
| links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or
| destroy the meaning that I'm trying to convey.
|
| Given the opportunity, I would send most links wrapped in
| `backticks`.
| enlightens wrote:
| For those who don't know, you can tap on the link preview
| graphic and select "Convert to Text Link" to switch back to
| clickable text. As you mention there's no way to change the
| automatic behavior but at least it is possible to switch back
| to text links on a case-by-case basis.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| THANK YOU
| layer8 wrote:
| Instead of Markdown, add support for editing links with text,
| like word processors have.
| RS-232 wrote:
| It would be awesome if Messages, Mail, and Notes rendered
| Markdown.
|
| System-wide Markdown editing would also be awesome, perhaps as
| a feature of the keyboard.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I hacked up something like this for Apple Notes. It's far
| from perfect, but at least it lets me type Markdown-style
| punctuation and get the expect results. Think of it like a
| crummy Vim mode sort of thing.
|
| https://honeypot.net/2024/01/17/making-notes-look.html
| alwillis wrote:
| If you want a Mac email program that renders Markdown,
| definitely checkout MailMate[1]. Indie developer, has already
| shipped a lot of updates this year.
|
| [1]: https://freron.com
| kgilpin wrote:
| Interestingly (to me) the SwiftUI Text element supports
| Markdown natively via AttributedString.
| anentropic wrote:
| I'd love to see Markdown support in MS OneNote...
| noworriesnate wrote:
| OneNote lets you add content in a canvas. It would be cool if
| there was an ASCII canvas note taking tool but I think it would
| have to be built on plain text from the ground up.
| anentropic wrote:
| Yeah I meant just within the individual text blocks, the
| canvas itself can't be Markdown of course
|
| It's such a more convenient way of "styling while you type"
| and has become the de facto way to do that... in Slack,
| Reddit comments, GitHub, Jira, Confluence etc... even MS
| Teams, they all allow Markdown "styling while you type"
| sylens wrote:
| OneNote feels like such a laggard in this space. They don't
| even have support for code blocks
| anentropic wrote:
| It's main reason why I want Markdown within text blocks TBH
| accrual wrote:
| And it's odd because Teams has first class support for many
| Markdown elements. I wrap code blocks in "```" all the time.
| dstroot wrote:
| Obsidian user here. BUT I also have a lot of stuff in Apple
| Notes. Have wanted to consolidate but always seemed to much of a
| chore. This is awesome for my use case. Kudos to Apple for adding
| this!
| samuelstros wrote:
| 100% agree with the sentimment. markdown is hell as a format for
| editors :D
|
| the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST
| that rich text editor frameworks _reliably_ operate on takes
| months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering
| effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into
| parsing and serializing markdown : /
|
| Anyhow, we took the learnings from the Markdown editor app and
| created "zettel" as a result:
| https://github.com/opral/monorepo/tree/main/packages/zettel/....
| The goal is to have an interoperable rich text AST--basically
| Markdown but with an AST spec.
| absurdo wrote:
| I've trained our support staff on basic markdown syntax and while
| we do use it predominantly for spitting out documentation and
| guides and whatnot, its usefulness far exceeds the original
| intent. And that's okay.
| RS-232 wrote:
| Sweet, just what I needed.
|
| This will make it even easier to migrate all my Apple Notes(tm)
| to Obsidian.
| orsenthil wrote:
| I wish Obsidian gained similar marketing as Apple Notes is
| getting at WWDC.
| exploderate wrote:
| This will make working with Google Docs easier, as they can
| copy&paste from Markdown.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| [flagged]
| e40 wrote:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?ls=1&mt=...
|
| This is an app called Exporter that exports your Notes to MD.
| Been using it for a while, to archive the state of my notes.
| kmelve wrote:
| I wrote a piece a few years ago that still reflects a lot of my
| thoughts on the tension between Markdown as a format and the
| actual experience of writing and publishing on the web:
| ["Thoughts on Markdown" - Smashing
| Magazine](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/02/thoughts-on-
| markdow...).
|
| What Apple seems to be doing with Notes--embracing Markdown
| syntax but not treating it as a source format--feels like a
| pragmatic move. It acknowledges Markdown's familiarity without
| overcommitting to it as a canonical format. That distinction
| matters: many people like typing _emphasis_ or `code`, but few
| need or want to version-control or export that exact syntax. It's
| the gesture of Markdown that carries value for most users, not
| the fidelity to a plain-text artifact. "Even" Google Docs
| implemented it recently.
|
| In my article, I argue that Markdown is increasingly a "source
| language" for interfaces, not documents, and this Apple Notes
| move seems to align with that trend. Curious how others feel
| about Markdown as an authoring experience vs. a content format.
| marxisttemp wrote:
| See also SwiftUI's AttributedString, which can be directly
| instantiated from a string literal containing Markdown syntax.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Nitpick: AttributedString is a member of the Swift Foundation
| framework. It's not limited to SwiftUI.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/attribu.
| ..
| 827a wrote:
| > The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you
| either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or
| database field. That's not what Apple Notes is or should be.
|
| I don't follow why this is a relevant concern for Apple Notes.
|
| By any measure I would argue that Notion "has markdown support".
| By that I mean: You type Markdown, Notion knows how to render the
| markdown you type, and you can easily export files in Markdown.
| However, what they _aren 't_ doing, by any stretch of the
| imagination, is storing your documents in a markdown format on
| their servers or your device.
|
| There's a third quality that you might label "Native Markdown"
| where the documents themselves _are_ stored in Markdown. Obsidian
| does this. I 'd imagine products like the Github Issues
| description field also does this. But I would not require this
| quality in a product which has "Markdown Support". In fact, I
| would argue this is the defining difference between saying that a
| product Supports Markdown versus it Is Markdown.
|
| Its tremendously and obviously unlikely that Apple will be
| changing the storage format of their notes to be Native Markdown.
| I also don't think it really matters for a product like Apple
| Notes; I don't care what format the notes are stored in. Users of
| Obsidian might care about this, but that's because Obsidian has a
| different kind of customer than Apple; people who worry about
| data portability. Totally cool; that's just not Apple Notes.
|
| Its like arguing that Vim keybinds are only interesting within
| Vim. My favorite way to use vim keybinds is this great Firefox
| extension; scroll down pages with j, copy the URL with yy...
| Markdown is more than just a data format; at a much more abstract
| level, its a keybinding system for text formatting. In Apple
| Notes today I have to hit Shift+Cmd+H to get a header. I'd much
| rather just hit #.
| jamesgill wrote:
| _My original description of what it is still stands: "Markdown is
| a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers._
|
| Yes, that's how John Gruber defines it. But like every creation
| you share with others, it can evolve. If popular, it _will_
| evolve. People create their own versions and uses and intentions
| with it.
|
| I've used markdown for 12 years or so, for two reasons:
|
| 1. As a way to write plain text but still get visual layout cues
| without using a proprietary format/tool (e.g., Word).
|
| 2. Have options for later conversion to other formats/outputs
| (for Gruber, HTML.)
|
| So for me, writing markdown on my Apple device means that instead
| of using Apple's proprietary format, I have another place to
| write plain text markdown and use/share it elsewhere (which I
| often do).
| philistine wrote:
| Gruber is Markdown's father but the overall Markdown community
| has stopped listening to him a long time ago. Doesn't help that
| he hasn't fixed the bugs in his Perl script since 2004.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Indeed. His post says: It's trivial to
| create malformed Markdown syntax
|
| That's because his specification is loose, and there are no
| test-cases nor updates to clarify ambiguities.
| astrange wrote:
| Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very
| simple process, which is to delete them and just remember
| everything.
| accrual wrote:
| I'm sure this in jest, but my real answer: I remember _so much
| more_ when I have notes to look back on. I store mine as some
| YYYY-MM-DD-Notes.txt and edit via local web UI or terminal
| /SSH. It's a blast to browse and see what I was thinking and
| doing, and how I've changed over time.
|
| I save _working knowledge_ elsewhere as Topic.md in subfolders
| so I can remember how I deployed an app or fixed a recurring
| issue etc.
| legacynl wrote:
| "Guys I invented the shovel to dig holes, not fill them. The
| pointy end of a shovel is perfectly suited for breaking ground.
| Why would you want to use that for filling holes!?"
| lostlogin wrote:
| Shovels aren't great for digging holes. That's what spades are
| for. Shovels are good for filling holes.
|
| I think I've missed the point.
| modernerd wrote:
| He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where
| physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really
| make sense for Notes outside of export.
|
| There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS
| (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus
| are just as close as `#` and `_` characters.
|
| Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of
| Notes. e.g. "end a line with two or more spaces then press return
| to create a <br>", which was designed to accommodate manually
| hard-wrapped text that Notes users likely don't want. Apple would
| have to follow something like CommonMark (feels unlikely) or
| implement their own Apple-flavoured Markdown, leaving you to
| learn what's supported and discover the quirks -- kind of like
| its partial implementation of vim input in Xcode.
|
| Popular Markdown apps seem to have converged on 'edit on line
| focus, preview on line blur', which is surely what the Notes app
| would do, because modal editing with preview and edit modes feels
| un-Appleish. 'Preview on line blur' _is_ nicer than a separate
| preview mode if you're a Markdown power user, but it still leaves
| many quirks you have to learn. (Just today I wrote, '# Thoughts
| on C#' in Obsidian, which reads ok with the cursor on that line
| until I pressed enter and the preview became, 'Thoughts on C'.
| Leaving me to learn I was supposed to know to write '#Thoughts on
| C\\#' in the edit mode.)
| woah wrote:
| I use markdown all the time on iOS with Notion. It functions as
| a shortcut for formatting operations like creating headings and
| bullets.
| larrywright wrote:
| I don't want Notes to become a Markdown editor. I think that
| would be confusing for the majority of users. What I _would_ like
| is for it to understand Markdown syntax and just convert it to
| the right thing. If I type "# My Note", it should convert that to
| note title format. If I type "## Heading" it should convert it to
| a heading format, and so on.
|
| Most apps do this already, to some extent. If you start a line
| with a - or an *, the app will convert it to a proper indented
| list. Heck, even Microsoft's apps do this. I'm just asking for it
| to handle a few more things.
| diggan wrote:
| > I don't want Notes to become a Markdown editor
|
| > I'm just asking for it to handle a few more things.
|
| How is what you're asking for not making Notes into a Markdown
| editor? Those are all features that come from Markdown, and the
| reason "most apps" already handle those, is because they're
| aiming to support Markdown to at least some extent.
| jeeyoungk wrote:
| I think the parent's suggesting that they should be "one way"
| shortcuts; i.e. "# Heading" auto-formatting as a heading is a
| shortcut, and it doesn't allow you to go back and modify the
| original markdown.
| larrywright wrote:
| That's exactly it.
| larrywright wrote:
| MS Word is not aiming to support Markdown.
| jeffrogers wrote:
| Well, there is no great way to import nicely formatted text into
| Notes, not even with Shortcuts. Respect to Gruber, but if Apple
| supports Markdown in Notes, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
| koinedad wrote:
| Looking forward to markdown support! I'd love something like what
| Notion does for input using markdown
| marxisttemp wrote:
| > It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax
|
| Not helped by Gruber's refusal to bless a specific well-specified
| Markdown flavor, leaving us to deal with all the undefined
| behavior of his original implementation.
| accrual wrote:
| Personally, I just want the ability to export from the stock iOS
| Notes app as plaintext at all. Currently I need to copy/paste my
| notes into my own editor or dump them .pdf and extract. I won't
| even be using markdown, I just want simple local-first backup.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Now do Journal exports too and I'll actually use the app.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Markdown is a great storage format for notes. The precision of
| editing in Markdown makes it easy to be certain your indenting is
| correct, or do weird things that are actually common, like having
| a sub-list that switches from bullets to numbers or from numbers
| to bullets.
| screye wrote:
| What's the strictest type of markdown that can be serialized into
| a yaml/json ?
|
| If a strict subset can have 2-way-conversion to json through
| yaml, then markdown can be an effective json editor for the lay
| person.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| I may be in the minority here, but I really don't want Notes to
| become a markdown editor. I enjoy the Rich Text editors far more.
| I find myself agreeing with Gruber this time.
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