[flagged]
[deleted]
Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
91–100 of 229 posts
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#92Markdown only makes sense in a non-WYSIWYG context.
Its fairly common to use markdown as shortcuts to WYSIWYG content - Obsidian and Notion for instance. At a higher level at some point if you want a fluid typing experience, you need some form of shortcuts, and given markdowns conciseness and ubiquity its a good choice as opposed to having a proprietary format users need to learn for just your app.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#93https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?ls=1&mt=...
This is an app called Exporter that exports your Notes to MD. Been using it for a while, to archive the state of my notes.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#94https://apps.apple.com/us/app/exporter/id1099120373?ls=1&mt=... This is an app called Exporter that exports your Notes to MD. Been using it for a while, to archive the state of my notes.
[deleted]
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#95I cannot understand how Apple notes works sometimes. For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines. Just fighting the tool. Stuff like this really makes me dislike it. I find syntax highlighting with markdown preferable than a WYSIWYG rich text editor. I get why people who don't know markdown prefer it, but the advantages diminish significantly if you know markdown.
I actually love that this was glossed over by him and most of the comments. I used Apple notes daily for years - hundreds or maybe thousand+ notes in it. The idea that markdown is easy to mess up compared to Apple notes is at best partially true. Apple notes messes up too, and in weird ways. The reality is if not markdown, its using its own syntax under the hood that is certainly not bug free, and will have its own (proprietary) bugs to deal with. And since its not markdown, you can't drop to raw text to fix it, or even understand it. Which is the whole reason more and more apps are moving towards it: You don't need to re-invent the wheel for all the standard note features, including your own special flavor of bugs. Apple notes realistically can't use Markdown in its UI. But if it could, having a toggle to flip to it would be lovely, especially when their UI gets buggy - there's always a plain text work around that's easy to understand, and fully human readable on its own.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#96[dead]
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#97When 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…
Those 80% sometimes DO get something out of it - when the resident nerd can fix their broken document because it’s Markdown or WordPerfect.
Just because I can’t fix my car doesn’t mean I want an unfixable car.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#98I wrote a piece a few years ago that still reflects a lot of my thoughts on the tension between Markdown as a format and the actual experience of writing and publishing on the web: [“Thoughts on Markdown” – Smashing Magazine](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/02/thoughts-on-markdow...).
What Apple seems to be doing with Notes—embracing Markdown syntax but not treating it as a source format—feels like a pragmatic move. It acknowledges Markdown’s familiarity without overcommitting to it as a canonical format. That distinction matters: many people like typing emphasis or `code`, but few need or want to version-control or export that exact syntax. It’s the gesture of Markdown that carries value for most users, not the fidelity to a plain-text artifact. "Even" Google Docs implemented it recently.
In my article, I argue that Markdown is increasingly a “source language” for interfaces, not documents, and this Apple Notes move seems to align with that trend. Curious how others feel about Markdown as an authoring experience vs. a content format.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#99Markdown only makes sense in a non-WYSIWYG context.
Its fairly common to use markdown as shortcuts to WYSIWYG content - Obsidian and Notion for instance. At a higher level at some point if you want a fluid typing experience, you need some form of shortcuts, and given markdowns conciseness and ubiquity its a good choice as opposed to having a proprietary format users need to learn for just your app.
+1 - a universal way of doing this via markdown beats learning whatever app-specific hotkeys I have to do to make an H3 or whatever. I don't have any particular feelings about markdown as a format for data, but as a universal set of shortcuts, I've found it to be a huge productivity boost.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#100> The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That’s not what Apple Notes is or should be.
I don't follow why this is a relevant concern for Apple Notes.
By any measure I would argue that Notion "has markdown support". By that I mean: You type Markdown, Notion knows how to render the markdown you type, and you can easily export files in Markdown. However, what they aren't doing, by any stretch of the imagination, is storing your documents in a markdown format on their servers or your device.
There's a third quality that you might label "Native Markdown" where the documents themselves are stored in Markdown. Obsidian does this. I'd imagine products like the Github Issues description field also does this. But I would not require this quality in a product which has "Markdown Support". In fact, I would argue this is the defining difference between saying that a product Supports Markdown versus it Is Markdown.
Its tremendously and obviously unlikely that Apple will be changing the storage format of their notes to be Native Markdown. I also don't think it really matters for a product like Apple Notes; I don't care what format the notes are stored in. Users of Obsidian might care about this, but that's because Obsidian has a different kind of customer than Apple; people who worry about data portability. Totally cool; that's just not Apple Notes.
Its like arguing that Vim keybinds are only interesting within Vim. My favorite way to use vim keybinds is this great Firefox extension; scroll down pages with j, copy the URL with yy... Markdown is more than just a data format; at a much more abstract level, its a keybinding system for text formatting. In Apple Notes today I have to hit Shift+Cmd+H to get a header. I'd much rather just hit #.