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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

#81

Post by kstrauser »

mechanicalpulse wrote: post #57
diggan wrote: post #43

Isn't it a bit early to have thoughts about something we don't know the UI/UX of? Could be that "Markdown support" is just "Import/Export as Markdown", or even just export. Or it could be a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor. The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10% of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation that doe…

Gruber is famously protective of the original Markdown specification and his specific use case. He’s reacting to others’ expectations and clarifying his position that a “Markdown editor” is a bit of an oxymoron. He supports that position by reiterating his inspiration for creating the format.

I understand his point, but I disagree with it. Markdown wasn’t invented for the purposes we use it for today, true. And yet the most popular programming editor today is a website running inside a modified browser, themed with CSS and extended with JavaScript.

We have a tendency, as a group, to push things beyond their original intent.

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

#84

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

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 wysiwyg editors are really descended from solutions for placing text on paper.

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

#85

Post by kstrauser »

RS-232 wrote: post #73
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #58

I’d love to see Markdown added to Apple Messages. I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login . The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them. But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey. Given the opportunity, I would send most links…

It would be awesome if Messages, Mail, and Notes rendered Markdown. System-wide Markdown editing would also be awesome, perhaps as a feature of the keyboard.

I hacked up something like this for Apple Notes. It’s far from perfect, but at least it lets me type Markdown-style punctuation and get the expect results. Think of it like a crummy Vim mode sort of thing.

https://honeypot.net/2024/01/17/making-notes-look.html

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

#86

Post by zdw »

everybodyknows wrote: post #63
zdw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's this: https://commonmark.org But everyone seems to have their own slightly different flavor, either pre- or post- that "standardization".

Notably, Github's superset: https://github.github.com/gfm/

Given Github's owner, it's right out of their Embrace, Extend ... playbook.

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

#87

Post by cloverich »

mcdow wrote: post #29

Kinda stoked for this. Been working on a notes app and apple notes is my current daily driver. Apple notes stores the notes in a proprietary and opaque format atm. I’ve been scheming ways to break the notes out without luck. Now I can just wait for this feature to come out.

Was also in your boat, but realized there are various tools to export Apple notes as markdown that work reasonably well; Obsidian itself recommends one[1]. Meanwhile, I'm impressed that Apple notes keeps getting better. It was _almost_ good enough for me to abandon my own note taking app. The things that slowly drove me nuts were lack of real code formatting and lack of image formatting (after they added note linking and tagging, the prior issues I had). I'm still surprised how long it takes most notes apps to get decent out of the box image formatting; few would want to drop an image onto their note and have it blown up to take up the full page by default. Just make your notes app look like the typical blog by default and _most_ people will love it[2].

[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes. [2]: tbf it took me quite a bit of work to get there in my own app, and its still got bugs

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

#89

Post by Zak »

wodenokoto wrote: post #18
Zak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like my Markdown notes editor, but I agree it's not the right choice for Apple notes because exposing the underlying machinery in everyday use is not Apple's style.

It’s also not handy to reach the mark-up characters from a touch keyboard. And if you are adding backticks and asterisks to a markup bar, you might as well just add bold and italics to the markup bar.

This varies a bit by touch keyboard. The standard iPhone keyboard is particularly bad at this while the AOSP and Google keyboards on Android aren't so bad.

Joplin, the notes app I've been using lately does have a markup bar with those features.

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