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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

#71

Post by leakycap »

divbzero wrote: post #8
lurk2 wrote: post #4

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.

You can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.

This is great until you edit your notes on IMAP from more than one app. Apple Notes, Outlook, Gmail, and others with access to IMAP notes will corrupt one another's entries very easily. Style is also very difficult to control in this setup.

Apple Notes is not intended for people who want to own their data and have control over export

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

#73

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

mdeeks wrote: post #42
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear’s implementation is great. One thing I hate about rich text is that it's basically impossible to not inherit the formatting of adjacent text if you move your cursor around, nor is it possible to see the current formatting state. If your cursor is between whitespace and an italic word, will inserted text be normal or italic? Markdown’s formatting characters solve this by creating a boundary that the cursor can be…

Interesting, because I find that very intuitive. If my cursor is on or next to formatting, it'll inherit it. I find formatting after the fact a lot easier too. Bold a line? cmd+shift-right and then cmd+b. Trying to add formatting after the fact with markdown isn't fun. Though many editors try to helpfully insert markdown for you with hotkeys, it often fails on multi-line things.

What does “next to formatting” mean? There's always some formatting on both sides of the cursor.

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

#75

Post by ninkendo »

derefr wrote: post #22
marbletiles wrote: post #2

> Instead of tapping buttons to bold text or create headers, users could type *bold* or # Header directly into their notes. Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too. Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that…

But formatting already-typed text on iOS is incredibly fiddly (as you have to select a text span first, and iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this — especially if the span starts or stops at something iOS doesn't consider a "whole token.") Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.

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 under the little preview bubble. My muscle memory is still to do this when I want to highlight text; it just never works and I always get frustrated.

Maybe if I start remembering to double tap to highlight text, the text editing experience might actually start to be passable? :shrug:

(Yes, I know about long pressing the keyboard to use it as a trackpad. I do that most of the time, but it’s still fiddly, it very very often misinterprets a tap and starts text selection wildly off from where I wanted it to, and the only fix is to tap around in the text area.)

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

#77

Post by meindnoch »

RollingRo11 wrote: post #60

> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly That's a shame. I was hoping for at least the option to edit in markdown (and praying for LaTeX support too)

>and praying for LaTeX support too

This gave me the belly laugh I needed, thanks!

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

#80

Post by lurk2 »

subjectsigma wrote: post #31
lurk2 wrote: post #4

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.

From the article: “Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years.” Am I misunderstanding or is that the feature you were asking for? If not then what does the article mean by export?

That would fix the problem if it supported the export of indentation and attachments, but I would still never bother with a proprietary solution when a free-as-in-freedom solution already exists.

I’m still holding out for a phone I can use as a general-purpose computer, though, so take that for what it’s worth.

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