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Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

macrumors.com

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

#211

Post by ninkendo »

eviks wrote: post #183
ninkendo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just typing a reply to gush about how much I agree with you and how awful iOS text editing is (I’m on my iPhone at the moment) and decided to play with editing text to get some example complaints, when I had an epiphany: iOS lets you double tap to start a text selection now. I don’t know when this started. I’m 99% sure I used to long-press to start a text selection, and that it would start highlighting the word…

How can you be 99% sure when long press in *edited text* like when writing notes doesn't select, but instead moves the caret with a magnifying glass?

I said I was 99% sure it used to work that way.

But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari.

That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not.

So it’s not that they changed something, it’s that the behavior is different for editable vs noneditable text, and my brain keeps doing the wrong one. Maybe now that I know about double tapping my brain can finally have a complete picture of the behavior split and I can stop fucking it up each time.

(Although I’m still pretty certain that doing a brief long press, but not long enough for the magnifying glass to show up, used to select a word of text. I can’t prove this though. Maybe I’m remembering the Force Touch days when you used to be able to do a Force Touch while long pressing to expand selection. That would make sense with the timeline.)

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

#212

Post by zmb_ »

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.

It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.

The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.

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

#213

Post by AlotOfReading »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #151
AlotOfReading wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typora, obsidian, marktext, vscode and emacs with the right extensions, etc. Most people don't care enough to search them out, but you have a good number of choices available.

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.

The first 3 are exactly what you're saying. The 4th and 5th have dual panes with live updates of fully rendered markdown on the side.

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

#214

Post by WA »

wltr wrote: post #122

Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19? I assume, they’ll start following a year of release both for macOS and iOS, so it would be easier to know for non-techies. But my first reaction was ‘em, 8 years into the future? Looks weird, isn’t it? Maybe that’s some kind of a joke.’

I looked for April 1st as a date. Next thought: the "news" is about an LLM writing these articles and messed something up.

But thanks for clarifying!

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

#215

Post by Argonaut998 »

wltr wrote: post #122

Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19? I assume, they’ll start following a year of release both for macOS and iOS, so it would be easier to know for non-techies. But my first reaction was ‘em, 8 years into the future? Looks weird, isn’t it? Maybe that’s some kind of a joke.’

I’m pretty sure Samsung did the same with their S series phones a few years back. Nobody seemed to mind.

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

#216

Post by SebastianKra »

ornornor wrote: post #186
michelb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like they are spread way too thin, and individual teams are not allowed to improve their app/services/parts on their own. If I had to work on Apple Notes I would have several suggestions, not all worthy of work of-course, but letting a lot of apps go stagnant is something else entirely.

> spread too thin It’s a choice though, it’s not like they aren’t the richest company in the world.

Nevermind richtest company. It's like every year they release three new half-baked apps, that will not receive updates in years.

Just focus on a core and let third-party apps do what they're good at.

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

#217

Post by eviks »

ninkendo wrote: post #211
eviks wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be 99% sure when long press in *edited text* like when writing notes doesn't select, but instead moves the caret with a magnifying glass?

I said I was 99% sure it used to work that way. But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari. That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not. So…

hm, here is the original iphone user guide for ios 3.1

> When you’re typing, you canalso double-tap to select a word. In read-only documents, such as webpages, or email or text messages you’ve received, touch and hold to select a word.

Also, double tapping selects by words in editable notes vs by letter in read-only, so the OS will continue to fight you feeble attempts at trying to have a consistent experience!

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

#218

Post by slightwinder »

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.

You can have all that and even more with Markdown too, but it comes with the price of "vendor lock-in", as most of those are kinda optional and depending on which markdown-app you are using. On the other side, org-mode has also kind of a vendor lock-in, as there is only one leading and format-defining app, even if there are a handful of clones implementing a subset of its features. Though, at the moment org-mode, has a slight advantage in having a more well-defined and maintained format-definition, while Markdown seems more a chaotic meltingpot of anything goes.. but it seems the community-effect manifests in the long run, and people settle on new features and their syntax. The only thing missing is a proper definition of this, which is supported by everyone. Obsidian seems to have enough weight to pull this at the moment, but we will see.

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

#219

Post by slightwinder »

TheDong wrote: post #103
irrational wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL there is a markup language war. Who are the combatants?

html, markdown, reStructuredText, wikitext, AsciiDoc, emacs org mode, LaTeX, and a bunch of others. In some contexts, JSX and markdown are also competing. I think HTML is the true winner.

Depends on which war we are talking about. Personal writing? Professional writing? Machine-readable? For personal writing, HTML is not really participating, for the rest, mostly yes, even though for AI-tooling markdown seems the preferred language now.

Which opens the question, is there a real advantage in using Markdown with AI instead of HTML? Or did nobody ever tried this?

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

#220

Post by danielscrubs »

ornornor wrote: post #164
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.

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.

The more you rely on abstracted (and sometimes leaky) tools—like Swift versus Objective-C, or SwiftUI versus its predecessors—the more likely you are to feel helpless when something goes wrong.
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