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Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

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Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#111

Post by larrywright »

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.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#113

Post by soulofmischief »

packetlost wrote: post #107
Spooky23 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Its the new BBCode.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#114

Post by packetlost »

soulofmischief wrote: post #113
packetlost wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its the new BBCode.

It's a lot better than BBCode tbh

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#116

Post by legacynl »

zdw wrote: post #12
bowsamic wrote: post #6

I’m surprised to see a DF article here. I thought he was black listed

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.

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.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#117

Post by eviks »

dotdi wrote: post #41

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…

1. That's solved via readily available exports, so no need to pay the markup price 2. Same thing + other open formats exist

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#118

Post by vthommeret »

nonethewiser wrote: post #39

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.

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.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#120

Post by lblume »

minimaxir wrote: post #77
diggan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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.

Was Jekyll ever that popular though?
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