171–180 of 277 posts
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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?
GitHub renders Markdown if you click on a file in the Web repo view.
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.
I think apple cares a lot less than it used to and it’s been like that for a while. There are long standing bugs or missing features on iOS that are just there and have been for years. I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.
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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.
Markdown is plain text, so using Markdown is using plain text. What is your alternative to Markdown here?
If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?
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.
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
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Markdown is plain text, so using Markdown is using plain text. What is your alternative to Markdown here?
That's just playing dumb. It's only "plain text" in that it's non-binary. It contains formatting codes that aren't part of the informative content. If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?
It's not "clutter" it's meaningful information for the human eye in plain text.
Which is why I'm asking: what's your alternative? Is it no headers, no lists, no standard * or \_ for emphasis, as it has been done long before Markdown existed?
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Thanks, but most of those are examples of exactly what I'm talking about: an editor with a Markdown "preview" function tacked on. I just want to double-click on the .md file and read it in a rendered form. Otherwise... what's the point? And because of the lack of such readers, everyone just reads the plain text with a bunch of garbage in it. It's just gallingly dumb.
Editors are for, gasp , writing or editing source code like Markdown. Some people write source code and aren't just users... That's what documentation generators are for, to render all the docs and search them if you're just a user.
Your pretension that most programming involves writing Markdown "source code" is absurd. I neither want nor need Markdown in any of my source-code editors, ever. Not once in decades of professional programming have I missed it.
And if I do need to create Markdown, I will want to do so in a simple WYSIWIG editor and save it as MD. Again... not in my IDE.
I first thought it was some kind of extrapolation like... at the rate features are currently being added, Markdown will land in ~2032 with iOS 26... just noticed about the new version numbering, I missed that news!
It sounded to me like a joke, as in “markdown will be supported on February 30th”. Then I read the article text, which seemed serious, and I was confused.
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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.
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Markdown is plain text, so using Markdown is using plain text. What is your alternative to Markdown here?
That's just playing dumb. It's only "plain text" in that it's non-binary. It contains formatting codes that aren't part of the informative content. If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?
My "alternative" is to have DEDICATED, lightweight Markdown viewers. The major OSes have long come with a simple text-file viewer that can render RTF. Why not Markdown?
In the meantime, I'm mystified as to why the format is so rampant when there is so little support for it.
I would not recommend investing in the iOS Notes ecosystem. There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud. If you need a note-taking app, go with Joplin instead; it supports Markdown, has both iOS and desktop clients, and supports self-hosted syncing.
> There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud. You can have an Apple Notes folder backed by IMAP which lets you get at the notes as `multipart/related; type="text/html"` emails (including media). I use it on my servers for family-controlled email allow/deny lists. (Definitely more faff to deal with than something like Obsidian or Joplin's Markdown notes though.)