Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 277 posts

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#141

Post by dingaling »

nextos wrote: post #95
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is funny because it’s really an incomplete spec that originated from a blog post. But it won anyway because both machines and humans can use it with relative ease, which is apparently quite a difficult thing to achieve in a markup language

It might be my Emacs bias, but I find Org much nicer as a format. For instance, timestamps and todo items make it trivial to use Org as a planner. This would be great to have in applications such as Apple Notes.

Which is what frustrates me with the invention of Markdown.

A ten minute web search would have revealed it was already a solved problem, instead of splintering and inventing a new 'standard'. But that was somehow too much effort.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#142

Post by selcuka »

whatever1 wrote: post #78

Markdown is the defacto language of the llms. Between this and the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown I think that markdown officially has won the markup language war.

> the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown

Thank you for pointing me to the MarkItDown library [1]. I had no idea such a thing existed.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#143

Post by fhd2 »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #109
nextos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be my Emacs bias, but I find Org much nicer as a format. For instance, timestamps and todo items make it trivial to use Org as a planner. This would be great to have in applications such as Apple Notes.

I love org-mode, but if I were king, it would accept freakin' back-quotes for monospaced text. Instead, it takes ~tilde~ or =equals=, and I will never remember the difference no matter how many times I look it up.

I switch between Markdown and Org Mode a lot, the syntactic differences don't bother me too much, but I guess I like Markdown's a bit more. But what I really miss in Markdown:

1. Collapsible headlines and headline search.

2. Executable source code blocks (for notebook style work).

3. TODO states.

4. Time tracking and clock tables.

5. Table formulas.

6. Inline LaTeX and document generation in general.

Now 1 is just an editor feature, and some of these others could be, too. But I wish Markdown was more powerful, extensible, or less ubiquitous.

What bothers me most about Org Mode is that support is pretty limited outside Emacs. We use it as a wiki replacement at my company, for that integrations into other editors are kinda good enough. But there's some areas like reporting only Emacs users can realistically work on. GitLab (and Forgejo, which we recently switched to) render Org pretty nicely, so it's easy to consume in a browser. But editing is a different story.

So I guess I wish for either a less complex (and thus easier to support) Org, or a more powerful Markdown.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#144

Post by DidYaWipe »

RandallBrown wrote: post #114
DidYaWipe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying. You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm t…

> You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? Every source control website I've used will render Markdown as HTML for you.

So you need to round-trip it through a Web site? Wow, convenient.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#145

Post by pvo50555 »

I am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times? I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#146

Post by DidYaWipe »

meehai wrote: post #126
DidYaWipe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying. You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm t…

vscode with the markdown plugin works really good. text on the left, render on the right pane example: https://imgur.com/9rjoMa2.png

Thanks, but that's a prime example of having to launch an editor and invoke a "preview" function (after installing a plug-in) to view this inexplicably ubiquitous format.

It's even dumber when you ponder: What is this a "preview" of? How the document will look in... a nonexistent viewer?

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#147

Post by DidYaWipe »

TheDong wrote: post #105
DidYaWipe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying. You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm t…

Markdown renders to html. Browsers read html. You're supposed to read markdown with a browser by rendering it to html and reading the html.

What a dumb pain in the ass. Do you seriously check out a repo, run the read-me file through a Markdown-to-HTML converter, and then launch a browser to read the result?

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#148

Post by DidYaWipe »

jen20 wrote: post #111
DidYaWipe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying. You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm t…

Part of the point of Markdown is that it's supposed to read like plain text - many of the elements is what was commonplace on usenet and in email. If you're on macOS though, the best option for rendered Markdown is a quicklook plugin. There are a few around - I like [1] though. [1]: https://github.com/smittytone/PreviewMarkdown

Thanks! But then why not just use plain text? Because of the lack of widely-available, lightweight Markdown readers, everyone just ends up reading the text with a bunch of codes in it. It's just... dumb.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#149

Post by DidYaWipe »

vunderba wrote: post #119
DidYaWipe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying. You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with? After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm t…

For a second there I thought you were referring to a hardware solution. It would be pretty neat if I could drop straight markdown files into my Kindle and have them rendered in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.

I agree, but it's worse than that: There aren't even widely-available SOFTWARE readers.

Re: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

#150

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pvo50555 wrote: post #145

I am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times? I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.

Shift+Option+Command V pastes plain text on macOS.
Post reply on HN