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 a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.
Agreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft) GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate should just use Markdown.
Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be a barrier to capturing and communicating institutional knowledge.
I also tell people that, if you're new to Markdown, even a plain text approximation that doesn't quite format correctly is strongly encouraged, so long as they capture the info somewhere accessible. I'll even offer to cheerfully fix the missing/bad Markdown, so that we have working docs and people can learn the very few parts of Markdown they missed; it's really not much.
(I personally have heavily used many much-much better technical documentation systems, and helped develop a WYSIWYG-ish SGML-based one professionally, but just using Markdown is a no-brainer right now. There are much more important things I want people learning and doing, than N different ways of minimally formatting documentation in N different places.)
No, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.
A mix plantuml for constrained no-frills diffable standard diagrams and yEd for actual manual placement and boxes-and-arrows drawing - local editing, both can be scripted to export to an image format - is a good local optimum. I haven't found a much better combination for years.
I agree. I use markdown a lot and was trying to use Mermaid for diagrams in it and it was frustrating. Among the biggest issues I ran into was that text was constantly cut off or covered up.
> (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats.
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.
Former lawyer here. That most commercial contract work is done in Word is a source of major frustration and wasted time for many lawyers. Others are simply unaware that there are any authoring/editing paradigms that allow one to separate the drudgery of getting document formatting just-so, from the actual value-additive work.
Unfortunately there’s no realistic solution to the lock-in, so wrestling with broken paragraph formatting, mismatched text sizes, auto-numbering errors, etc at 2am before a client deadline remains the norm. One of the most frustrating parts of the job.
I never have those issues, but I'm the only one editing my stuff. I use styles religiously when I use Word for professional documents. It takes a little more time and effort but pays out over the long haul.
I was on a project and complained heavily that we were not using styles,. The complaints got my manager to state that another person would do all the formatting. Of course the other person left befor the end and I had to do all the formatting.
That’s why. If you use styles and embrace sanity in general, it’s fine. But word is like Perl, there’s more than one way to do it.
Paste additions to the middle of a numbered list from legacy documents that break the number sequence and use custom fonts altar create weird problems? Sure.
Allow sociopaths to format text using a series of invisible text boxes? Sure.
Decide to randomly lose the names of editors and contributors? Sure.
There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
lol. I’m not sure if that’s an insult or a compliment. I use message boards to blow off steam, and have never used any LLM to write anything. Genius or idiot, purely organic writing. :)
Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it did line numbers better than any other software. I'm really surprised that MS didn't pick up on that and improve Word's line numbering: it's a vital feature for a number of professions.
> Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it did line numbers better than any other software.
Lawyer here: I loved WordPerfect (for DOS) because of Reveal Codes and its easy keystroke macros, which let me write an Emacs keyboard emulator for it. (Yes, I eventually did one for Microsoft Word for Windows, which I use to this day.)
I posted the DOS version on CompuServe (!) probably 30 or 35 years ago. I don't think I ever posted the Word for Windows version. I switched to a MacBook a dozen years ago; I think I remapped some of its keys to emulate Emacs. (But in recent years I've used mostly Emacs itself and org-mode, because these days I'm mostly a law professor and use Word mainly in the occasional client contract-negotiation project.)
Everyone gets something out of markdown, even the 80-95% of document writers that don't get what they want out of it for writing don't have to read as much slop from the others in their group.
Markdown was here before the other (currently) big formats and will be here after them. It's not perfect, but at least I don't need to worry about it disappearing on me like every other piece of tech and software I own.
> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption
That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself.
Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.
As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.
I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).
My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.
It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.
I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.
It's simple but has good enough capabilities and it's available in a universal format (plain text) that will never expire or get sold or become inaccessible
I love the relative simplicity of core markdown with if I need to get fancy to add some html (which is rare) and it works so well in programs like Joplin, rather than fighting weird formatting in programs like OneNote and EverNote
Many formats these days are cleartext. Microsoft Office documents and LibreOffice documents, to name two collections of formats, are both xml based. Not to mention HTML, Latex - the list is long. Markdown is fine but overused, to the point where even the creator is now warning it’s not for everything.
He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really make sense for Notes outside of export.
There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters.
Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a line with two or more spaces then press return to create a <br>", which was designed to accommodate manually hard-wrapped text that Notes users likely don't want. Apple would have to follow something like CommonMark (feels unlikely) or implement their own Apple-flavoured Markdown, leaving you to learn what's supported and discover the quirks — kind of like its partial implementation of vim input in Xcode.
Popular Markdown apps seem to have converged on 'edit on line focus, preview on line blur', which is surely what the Notes app would do, because modal editing with preview and edit modes feels un-Appleish. 'Preview on line blur' _is_ nicer than a separate preview mode if you're a Markdown power user, but it still leaves many quirks you have to learn. (Just today I wrote, '# Thoughts on C#' in Obsidian, which reads ok with the cursor on that line until I pressed enter and the preview became, 'Thoughts on C'. Leaving me to learn I was supposed to know to write '#Thoughts on C\#' in the edit mode.)
Keyboard-accessibility isn't the only advantage of formatting characters.
The most frustrating, throw-my-device-at-the-wall issue with 90% of WYSIWYG text editors, is the insane handling of invisible input states.
- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.
- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.
- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)
There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.
Do iOS devices still default to translating consecutive spaces into “. “ within a few seconds? Always used to be a bother when authoring md content on an iPad.
I 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.
I don’t want Notes to become a Markdown editor. I think that would be confusing for the majority of users. What I would like is for it to understand Markdown syntax and just convert it to the right thing. If I type “# My Note”, it should convert that to note title format. If I type “## Heading” it should convert it to a heading format, and so on.
Most apps do this already, to some extent. If you start a line with a - or an *, the app will convert it to a proper indented list. Heck, even Microsoft’s apps do this. I’m just asking for it to handle a few more things.
> I’m just asking for it to handle a few more things.
How is what you're asking for not making Notes into a Markdown editor? Those are all features that come from Markdown, and the reason "most apps" already handle those, is because they're aiming to support Markdown to at least some extent.
I think the parent's suggesting that they should be "one way" shortcuts; i.e. "# Heading" auto-formatting as a heading is a shortcut, and it doesn't allow you to go back and modify the original markdown.
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].
So first of all, I like Apple notes for its simplicity and ability to sync with iCloud. I don't really care if it's exportable using markdown, I only really care that it is exportable. Because I'd like to migrate to the notes app I am working on.
The biggest thing that excites me about this is the fact that other Apple Notes export formats absolutely suck at the moment. You have PDF, and Pages. One's not editable, the other is a proprietary format that will lose formatting if converted to ODF or Word and is clunky in general.
"Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it."
As someone who enjoys note-taking in Obsidian (by far my favorite super-powered markdown editor), I respectfully disagree with the premise and conclusion. On the contrary, IME, MD isn't single-purpose, and it absolutely can and does serve as a first-rate format for note-taking.
I take my notes in INI format with a lose schema, as I accumulate data I tend to move towards something more concrete and write tools for it. I think this is the absolute best compromise between some kind of formal personal ERP-like (PRP?) system and something super loose like Markdown or org mode.
Of course doing this on an iPhone is an absolute nightmare because everything has to be blessed by Apple and you can't just do one-off ad-hoc automations or usefully compose tooling that touches the filesystem. Everything has to be canned and sharecropped (at best) so them adding Markdown to the only text editor that supports fast, energy efficient background sync is a huge deal.
When I had an iPhone I did try doing some server-side automation with the SGML-like (can't remember if it was actual HTML or not) format notes used. Like most of those sorts of things it was a miserable uphill fight to get value out of the thing. I've been so happy ever since I've completely given up on anything smartphone related.
Did you ever test drive the Drafts app? It is remarkably easy to build customized workflows, both editing and document processing, and is built to be glue between different document/message apps.
It's a little late for that now since I don't own a smartphone anymore but it looks like there isn't a Linux version so the usefulness to me would have been limited anyway.
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.
Markdown is a great storage format for notes. The precision of editing in Markdown makes it easy to be certain your indenting is correct, or do weird things that are actually common, like having a sub-list that switches from bullets to numbers or from numbers to bullets.
Obsidian user here. BUT I also have a lot of stuff in Apple Notes. Have wanted to consolidate but always seemed to much of a chore. This is awesome for my use case. Kudos to Apple for adding this!
Markdown is now the go to baseline for importing and exporting text data. I can see how I might want to export some more personal Notes to DayOne and archive some notes I don't need anymore to a more durable storage format. Would welcome this functionality.
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 doesn't seem like it'll happen?
Notes is already a WYSIWYG editor, with a feature-set exceeding that of plain Markdown (handwritten notes, math formulas and plots, colored highlighting, etc.). In the general case, Markdown export and re-import would likely be lossy, or would have to use HTML elements for non-Markdown features. The main question IMO is if they’ll add Markdown source visualization and source editing, in addition to export/import. It could conceivably even just be export, without import.
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.
I’ve trained our support staff on basic markdown syntax and while we do use it predominantly for spitting out documentation and guides and whatnot, its usefulness far exceeds the original intent. And that’s okay.
Funny. I am in the process of providing basic training on Markdown to our support staff. I think more than 80% of what we now write is in Markdown format. It is easy to read/write for humans. And AI.
Yeah, I understand that it might get confusing to use multiple implementations, or to transition between the two, but I seriously doubt these claims that “regular people” (as in, people who are expected to know how to use Word) are struggling with the syntax itself.
The article pretends that Markdown got popular because “it was there”. 15 years ago people were adopting it _because_ it is dead simple, unobtrusive, and visually evocative.
The ones who made it popular, in other words, did so quite intentionally.
I love Apple notes and being able to export to Markdown is useful for generating LLM context and for vender neutral backup. I hope there is an Export All Notes option.
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.
Biggest advantage of markdown is that it is directly understandable using llm, as it is native text format, all others cannot be copy pasted and fed to llm and you have to write some translation between them.
Mr. Gruber was certainly one of the inventors of Markdown but has rested on the laurels ever since. Remember that the late Aaron Schwartz was the co-inventor of Markdown. So let's not give Mr. Gruber too much attention for his opinions on how Markdown has evolved because he's chosen not to participate in its development or adoption.
Indeed, he is far more likely to let loose a tirade of anti-Trump sentiment, and in that regard he comes across as a terribly damaged individual. His opinions are many, and so we cannot give them too much weight.
Well, there is no great way to import nicely formatted text into Notes, not even with Shortcuts. Respect to Gruber, but if Apple supports Markdown in Notes, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
My original description of what it is still stands: “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
Yes, that's how John Gruber defines it. But like every creation you share with others, it can evolve. If popular, it will evolve. People create their own versions and uses and intentions with it.
I've used markdown for 12 years or so, for two reasons:
1. As a way to write plain text but still get visual layout cues without using a proprietary format/tool (e.g., Word).
2. Have options for later conversion to other formats/outputs (for Gruber, HTML.)
So for me, writing markdown on my Apple device means that instead of using Apple's proprietary format, I have another place to write plain text markdown and use/share it elsewhere (which I often do).
Gruber is Markdown's father but the overall Markdown community has stopped listening to him a long time ago. Doesn't help that he hasn't fixed the bugs in his Perl script since 2004.
I was a heavy user of MS OneNote. It got slower and slower as I added more notes. And some notes got long. And then I discovered Obsidian with Markdown support. Now the idea of using OneNote sends shivers down my spine.
I have some big notes and tbh I find it totally fine (on macOS)
The two things that would make a world of difference to me are:
- having a 'code block' style, preferably accessed via familiar single and triple-backticks markdown syntax
- for the Android app to have a "magnifying cursor" like mobile apps are all supposed to have... trying to edit a note and drag the cursor around with your finger without having the little magnifying popup is a complete pain
OneNote lets you add content in a canvas. It would be cool if there was an ASCII canvas note taking tool but I think it would have to be built on plain text from the ground up.
Yeah I meant just within the individual text blocks, the canvas itself can't be Markdown of course
It's such a more convenient way of "styling while you type" and has become the de facto way to do that... in Slack, Reddit comments, GitHub, Jira, Confluence etc... even MS Teams, they all allow Markdown "styling while you type"
I may be in the minority here, but I really don't want Notes to become a markdown editor. I enjoy the Rich Text editors far more. I find myself agreeing with Gruber this time.
> It’s trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax
Not helped by Gruber’s refusal to bless a specific well-specified Markdown flavor, leaving us to deal with all the undefined behavior of his original implementation.
> 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 #.
I 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.
> For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines
I feel like this is why a lot of us use Markdown/Org, because this is the most annoying issue in Word to me since 2003. Why are the indentation rules so arbitrary?
I don’t use word processors often (less than once a year in general), and did something comparatively advanced in LibreOffice Writer a few months ago, involving mixing English and an Indian language, and trying to use styles and such (equivalent to tacking on a stylesheet in HTML). I learned that the toolbar button for lists creates a list with hard-coded inline styles for bullet appearance, indent amounts, &c. If you want to change it, you can’t use that button any more, and have to make your own style with the appropriate properties (not easy) and apply them to each list item.
Part of the mess is that it doesn’t seem to actually model lists, just paragraphs which might have a list level associated with them. I have no idea why this was ever deemed acceptable: it precludes multiple markers on one line:
1. a) Sorry, but you can’t do this.
b) It’s not expressible.
2. You need a paragraph first.
a) Then it can be done.
My guess is that LibreOffice inherited this limitation from Word. No idea if Word is so affected.
That's actually a nice perk since I have LLMs summarize or re-word my research findings quite often. I'm a disorganized person, so they've been a big help with me organizing my work.
I also like that Markdown is being added since it's what I typically use for documentation (github, etc). The default formatting in notes currently leaves something to be desired...
Shortcuts has Rich Text -> Markdown and Markdown -> Rich Text actions.
I made a couple quick shortcuts to go both ways, with the clipboard as both the input and output. I put a widget for this on my desktop and it makes it pretty easy. Not as easy as native support, but not bad.
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 wrapped in `backticks`.
For those who don't know, you can tap on the link preview graphic and select "Convert to Text Link" to switch back to clickable text. As you mention there's no way to change the automatic behavior but at least it is possible to switch back to text links on a case-by-case basis.
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.
If you want a Mac email program that renders Markdown, definitely checkout MailMate[1]. Indie developer, has already shipped a lot of updates this year.
I mean it’s lot like he’s touting some fringe thing just because he made it. It must be so weird to see markdown become the lingua franca of everything from online forums to LLMs.
As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author.
Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.
It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark.
And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites, but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff especially thankless.
At the time of the SM/CM/CommonMark kerfuffle a decade ago, Gruber was quite explicit that "X Flavored Markdown" was perfectly fine with him— Atwood even includes the relevant podcast snippet:
The thing he’s wrong about is not the name, it’s that markdown doesn’t need a standard. Markdown absolutely needed a spec, and gruber resisted that which is why the spec was done without him and has to be confusingly called CommonMark instead of just being markdown.
GFM predates microsoft’s acquisition of github by one year as a formal spec and six years as an informal one - but ms hardly has a monopoly on embrace-extend-extinguish.
Not sure if you're serious, but you made me laugh, so have an upvote.
I'm one of those people who went pretty hard into the whole "Second Brain" movement (using Apple Notes first, then Obsidian).
~6000 notes later and I've started finding the whole thing overwhelming and pointless at the same time. The vast majority of notes I have don't need to be noted down. At most they could have been a journal entry rather than a separate, curated piece.
Usually I hear something like "excessive noting means you're less likely to try to commit something to memory because you know it's there when you need it". (This is touted as an advantage of the Second Brain concept, incidentally.)
But I've actually found something different as well: excessive noting means you're actively engaging with significantly more information, and most of it is designed to be (or at least should be considered) ephemeral. Noting so much of it down is effectively the digital equivalent of hoarding junk, and the mental/memory repercussions are similar to the physical repercussions of hoarding actual junk.
With (most) note taking systems, you’re supposed to periodically “clean house/review”, which among other things, avoids the problem you’re describing. I don’t do it often myself tbf.
I'm sure this in jest, but my real answer: I remember so much more when I have notes to look back on. I store mine as some YYYY-MM-DD-Notes.txt and edit via local web UI or terminal/SSH. It's a blast to browse and see what I was thinking and doing, and how I've changed over time.
I save working knowledge elsewhere as Topic.md in subfolders so I can remember how I deployed an app or fixed a recurring issue etc.
I sort of understand the mindset that elaborate notetaking systems are a waste of time because 95 percent or more never gets used but the value of something like Apple Notes for tiny details that are both necessary and relatively tough to remember seems hard to dispute. Do you memorize things like part numbers, confirmation numbers, and dimensions?
(If this is a joke, well, I salute your dry humor.)
This but seriously. I find the vast majority of things I need to remember are better remembered by doing just enough of the research I did initially over again to jog my memory, I never read anything I write down again anyway. Although most of the knowledge work I do is programming, and I do write a lot of comments in the code or issue tracker so I guess that counts.
Personally, I just want the ability to export from the stock iOS Notes app as plaintext at all. Currently I need to copy/paste my notes into my own editor or dump them .pdf and extract. I won't even be using markdown, I just want simple local-first backup.
> Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball from Hacker News. It’s always short-lived, because for reasons I’ve never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their front page
It seems to me that he concludes that he's blacklisted because the traffic coming from Hacker News is short-lived?
> Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed to me an appropriate number of comments.
So this guy seems to think that he can predict what will be popular and what will not? I think he's burying the lede here, who cares about being blacklisted, this guy can tell the future !
Isn't it much more likely that his posts are just less popular, and drive less engagement than he hopes? Most people (even very smart people) are bad at meta-cognition, and are likely to fall in the trap of reasoning based on (hidden) assumptions.
If this guy actually has evidence of being blacklisted/botted I would be open to see it, but lack of engament isn't that.
There is a whole pile of dang comments about this brouhaha, he wasn't 'blacklisted', that's just something Gruber imagined because his articles don't do all that well on HN these days. People become less popular without HNs help.
He probably was blacklisted in some way and his recent complaints (which attracted a fair amount of attention here) probably led to dang et al reconsidering.
I can’t imagine there are a lot of Stallman-types here. After all, HN is the discussion forum for Y Combinator, a startup accelerator and VC group.
It seems sort of odd to have an “export to markdown” command. Markdown is nice… because it is sort of like a normal markup language, but easier to write, right? But exporting is specifically the one case where markdown’s strength doesn’t matter. The computer can type, like, real fast and can output verbose and niche syntax easily.
Why not export to the best format, LaTeX? I don’t think anyone could argue that Markdown is better than LaTeX as long as you don’t actually have to write it.
100% agree with the sentimment. markdown is hell as a format for editors :D
the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST that rich text editor frameworks reliably operate on takes months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into parsing and serializing markdown :/
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 a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.
Agreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft) GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate should just use Markdown.
Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be a barrier to capturing and communicating institutional knowledge.
I also tell people that, if you're new to Markdown, even a plain text approximation that doesn't quite format correctly is strongly encouraged, so long as they capture the info somewhere accessible. I'll even offer to cheerfully fix the missing/bad Markdown, so that we have working docs and people can learn the very few parts of Markdown they missed; it's really not much.
(I personally have heavily used many much-much better technical documentation systems, and helped develop a WYSIWYG-ish SGML-based one professionally, but just using Markdown is a no-brainer right now. There are much more important things I want people learning and doing, than N different ways of minimally formatting documentation in N different places.)
> other than diagrams
Works fine with some help https://mermaid.live/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...
No, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.
A mix plantuml for constrained no-frills diffable standard diagrams and yEd for actual manual placement and boxes-and-arrows drawing - local editing, both can be scripted to export to an image format - is a good local optimum. I haven't found a much better combination for years.
I agree. I use markdown a lot and was trying to use Mermaid for diagrams in it and it was frustrating. Among the biggest issues I ran into was that text was constantly cut off or covered up.
Is there a reason you specify pre-Microsoft GitHub?
> (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats.
Also covered by AsciiDoc.
"Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27744509
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.
Former lawyer here. That most commercial contract work is done in Word is a source of major frustration and wasted time for many lawyers. Others are simply unaware that there are any authoring/editing paradigms that allow one to separate the drudgery of getting document formatting just-so, from the actual value-additive work.
Unfortunately there’s no realistic solution to the lock-in, so wrestling with broken paragraph formatting, mismatched text sizes, auto-numbering errors, etc at 2am before a client deadline remains the norm. One of the most frustrating parts of the job.
I never have those issues, but I'm the only one editing my stuff. I use styles religiously when I use Word for professional documents. It takes a little more time and effort but pays out over the long haul.
But very few people do that.
I was on a project and complained heavily that we were not using styles,. The complaints got my manager to state that another person would do all the formatting. Of course the other person left befor the end and I had to do all the formatting.
That’s why. If you use styles and embrace sanity in general, it’s fine. But word is like Perl, there’s more than one way to do it.
Paste additions to the middle of a numbered list from legacy documents that break the number sequence and use custom fonts altar create weird problems? Sure.
Allow sociopaths to format text using a series of invisible text boxes? Sure.
Decide to randomly lose the names of editors and contributors? Sure.
Do you use the comment and change tracking features of Word?
I write stories and everyone uses Word documents for editing.
What's the problem with Word documents if you open them in Word?
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.
Agreed, but that’s the tension.
There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
[flagged]
Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.
It reads nothing like ChatGPT, the "on the flip" is a dead giveaway that it isn't. Strange comment.
lol. I’m not sure if that’s an insult or a compliment. I use message boards to blow off steam, and have never used any LLM to write anything. Genius or idiot, purely organic writing. :)
Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it did line numbers better than any other software. I'm really surprised that MS didn't pick up on that and improve Word's line numbering: it's a vital feature for a number of professions.
> Attorneys and architects loved Word Perfect because it did line numbers better than any other software.
Lawyer here: I loved WordPerfect (for DOS) because of Reveal Codes and its easy keystroke macros, which let me write an Emacs keyboard emulator for it. (Yes, I eventually did one for Microsoft Word for Windows, which I use to this day.)
That sounds really cool. Have you ever shared it?
I posted the DOS version on CompuServe (!) probably 30 or 35 years ago. I don't think I ever posted the Word for Windows version. I switched to a MacBook a dozen years ago; I think I remapped some of its keys to emulate Emacs. (But in recent years I've used mostly Emacs itself and org-mode, because these days I'm mostly a law professor and use Word mainly in the occasional client contract-negotiation project.)
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10383691
idk, a lot of non-devs use chat programs that use (a subset of) Markdown for rich text even if they don't know what that is.
Its the new BBCode.
It's a lot better than BBCode tbh
You can underline in BBCode.
You can have colors in BBCode.
You can embed html inside markdown
But at what price?
very high, usually, equivalent of dagnerouslySetInnerHtml on react if not handled/escaped/sanitized and taking user inputs
Everyone gets something out of markdown, even the 80-95% of document writers that don't get what they want out of it for writing don't have to read as much slop from the others in their group.
Markdown was here before the other (currently) big formats and will be here after them. It's not perfect, but at least I don't need to worry about it disappearing on me like every other piece of tech and software I own.
It's also great for writing documentation in a plaintext IDE, which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption.
> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption
That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself.
Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.
Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.
And Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord, they're all learning some Markdown
Teams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of italics).
What things like Slack and WhatsApp use are not variants of Markdown, but entirely unrelated lightweight markup languages <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>.
As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.
My least favorite Teams markdown idiosyncrasy is using (foobar) for emoji search instead of :foobar:
Technically speaking, Slack's markup language is mrkdwn.
That’s not technically, that’s marketingly (sure, it was presumably developers that named it, but it’s still marketing). mrkdwn is a horribly misleading name and they should feel guilty. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chrismorgan+mrkdwn&type=commen...
I get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).
Teams does not use Markdown AFAIK. I wish it did.
See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-markdown-form...
My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.
It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
Reddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.
Original Markdown didn’t have fenced code blocks either.
Yes, Old Reddit Markdown is much closer to original Markdown than to CommonMark. New Reddit Markdown is closer to CommonMark.
> Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs
It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed by GitHub back in the day.
Was Jekyll ever that popular though?
I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.
It certainly populated the "Mark Town to static HTML" blogging approach and created the room for its successors.
It's simple but has good enough capabilities and it's available in a universal format (plain text) that will never expire or get sold or become inaccessible
I love the relative simplicity of core markdown with if I need to get fancy to add some html (which is rare) and it works so well in programs like Joplin, rather than fighting weird formatting in programs like OneNote and EverNote
1. That's solved via readily available exports, so no need to pay the markup price 2. Same thing + other open formats exist
Another nice thing about markdown is that you can pick up the formatting even if reading the markdown in plaintext.
So lists look exactly how you would expect lists to look like if you were writing it on a piece of paper.
Italic/Bolds are surrounded by /* which convey emphasis even in plaintext.
Headings prefixed by # is a reasonable way to depict headings in plaintext and convey the intention immediately even if you don't know Markdown.
Many formats these days are cleartext. Microsoft Office documents and LibreOffice documents, to name two collections of formats, are both xml based. Not to mention HTML, Latex - the list is long. Markdown is fine but overused, to the point where even the creator is now warning it’s not for everything.
He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really make sense for Notes outside of export.
There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters.
Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a line with two or more spaces then press return to create a <br>", which was designed to accommodate manually hard-wrapped text that Notes users likely don't want. Apple would have to follow something like CommonMark (feels unlikely) or implement their own Apple-flavoured Markdown, leaving you to learn what's supported and discover the quirks — kind of like its partial implementation of vim input in Xcode.
Popular Markdown apps seem to have converged on 'edit on line focus, preview on line blur', which is surely what the Notes app would do, because modal editing with preview and edit modes feels un-Appleish. 'Preview on line blur' _is_ nicer than a separate preview mode if you're a Markdown power user, but it still leaves many quirks you have to learn. (Just today I wrote, '# Thoughts on C#' in Obsidian, which reads ok with the cursor on that line until I pressed enter and the preview became, 'Thoughts on C'. Leaving me to learn I was supposed to know to write '#Thoughts on C\#' in the edit mode.)
Keyboard-accessibility isn't the only advantage of formatting characters. The most frustrating, throw-my-device-at-the-wall issue with 90% of WYSIWYG text editors, is the insane handling of invisible input states.
- If you begin writing a bold word, but want to delete the first character, the style is reset.
- If you’re writing a list and you want to exit out of it, every editor has a different weird convention of doing that.
- I can’t even begin to describe the amount of broken behavior that is entering code in MS Teams (does Microsoft use Slack internally?)
There are some innovative ideas to solve this, like Bike [^1], but nobody goes to the effort of implementing them. So the easiest, most compatible and most intuitive solution are formatting characters like in Markdown.
[^1]: https://www.hogbaysoftware.com/posts/bike-rich-text/
I use markdown all the time on iOS with Notion. It functions as a shortcut for formatting operations like creating headings and bullets.
Do iOS devices still default to translating consecutive spaces into “. “ within a few seconds? Always used to be a bother when authoring md content on an iPad.
That can be disabled [0] (and I feel like has been on option for many years now).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go4x9sIGEg8
I 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.
See also SwiftUI’s AttributedString, which can be directly instantiated from a string literal containing Markdown syntax.
Nitpick: AttributedString is a member of the Swift Foundation framework. It's not limited to SwiftUI.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/attribu...
I don’t want Notes to become a Markdown editor. I think that would be confusing for the majority of users. What I would like is for it to understand Markdown syntax and just convert it to the right thing. If I type “# My Note”, it should convert that to note title format. If I type “## Heading” it should convert it to a heading format, and so on.
Most apps do this already, to some extent. If you start a line with a - or an *, the app will convert it to a proper indented list. Heck, even Microsoft’s apps do this. I’m just asking for it to handle a few more things.
> I don’t want Notes to become a Markdown editor
> I’m just asking for it to handle a few more things.
How is what you're asking for not making Notes into a Markdown editor? Those are all features that come from Markdown, and the reason "most apps" already handle those, is because they're aiming to support Markdown to at least some extent.
I think the parent's suggesting that they should be "one way" shortcuts; i.e. "# Heading" auto-formatting as a heading is a shortcut, and it doesn't allow you to go back and modify the original markdown.
That's exactly it.
MS Word is not aiming to support Markdown.
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
Maybe you could try these:
Export notes by folder: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3aed9f1608ce4efeb31a276ad02...
Export all notes: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1b305195692e42c19d258989475...
Notes to html: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1a61fe549b7c41d7b2e3511ee12...
Oh cool, thanks!!! I’ve heard of other people getting good value out of Shortcuts. Now I can give it a shot.
Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they're not markdown-exportable?
I haven't used Notes in decades other than to type out junk/numbers once every 4 months.
> Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they're not markdown-exportable?
Among other reasons, because the sync experience is second to none.
Some of the other reasons:
- Apple Pencil
- Shared notes with friends and family (vacation planning, lists, etc)
So first of all, I like Apple notes for its simplicity and ability to sync with iCloud. I don't really care if it's exportable using markdown, I only really care that it is exportable. Because I'd like to migrate to the notes app I am working on.
I have had flawless success converting screenshots into formatted text with llms
The biggest thing that excites me about this is the fact that other Apple Notes export formats absolutely suck at the moment. You have PDF, and Pages. One's not editable, the other is a proprietary format that will lose formatting if converted to ODF or Word and is clunky in general.
It makes sense that Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it.
As an aside, I have a dream that Apple Notes could be piped into a website as a form of blogging. As it is, I haven't found a way to do it...
"Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it."
As someone who enjoys note-taking in Obsidian (by far my favorite super-powered markdown editor), I respectfully disagree with the premise and conclusion. On the contrary, IME, MD isn't single-purpose, and it absolutely can and does serve as a first-rate format for note-taking.
I'm not trying to take Obsidian away from you...but I'm also not trying to sign my Grandma up for Obsidian :D
There’s https://alto.so/ that does exactly what you want.
I take my notes in INI format with a lose schema, as I accumulate data I tend to move towards something more concrete and write tools for it. I think this is the absolute best compromise between some kind of formal personal ERP-like (PRP?) system and something super loose like Markdown or org mode.
Of course doing this on an iPhone is an absolute nightmare because everything has to be blessed by Apple and you can't just do one-off ad-hoc automations or usefully compose tooling that touches the filesystem. Everything has to be canned and sharecropped (at best) so them adding Markdown to the only text editor that supports fast, energy efficient background sync is a huge deal.
When I had an iPhone I did try doing some server-side automation with the SGML-like (can't remember if it was actual HTML or not) format notes used. Like most of those sorts of things it was a miserable uphill fight to get value out of the thing. I've been so happy ever since I've completely given up on anything smartphone related.
Did you ever test drive the Drafts app? It is remarkably easy to build customized workflows, both editing and document processing, and is built to be glue between different document/message apps.
It's a little late for that now since I don't own a smartphone anymore but it looks like there isn't a Linux version so the usefulness to me would have been limited anyway.
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.
It does feel like a good option for export though (as John says in the post).
That was my dream once upon a time. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into making it happen. Check out my indie product: https://quotion.co
Also https://quotion.co/ for Notes to blog.
I think you want Alto / Montaigne (spelling?). They’re both made by the same person IIRC.
Markdown is a great storage format for notes. The precision of editing in Markdown makes it easy to be certain your indenting is correct, or do weird things that are actually common, like having a sub-list that switches from bullets to numbers or from numbers to bullets.
Obsidian user here. BUT I also have a lot of stuff in Apple Notes. Have wanted to consolidate but always seemed to much of a chore. This is awesome for my use case. Kudos to Apple for adding this!
Markdown is now the go to baseline for importing and exporting text data. I can see how I might want to export some more personal Notes to DayOne and archive some notes I don't need anymore to a more durable storage format. Would welcome this functionality.
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 doesn't seem like it'll happen?
Notes is already a WYSIWYG editor, with a feature-set exceeding that of plain Markdown (handwritten notes, math formulas and plots, colored highlighting, etc.). In the general case, Markdown export and re-import would likely be lossy, or would have to use HTML elements for non-Markdown features. The main question IMO is if they’ll add Markdown source visualization and source editing, in addition to export/import. It could conceivably even just be export, without import.
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.
I’ve trained our support staff on basic markdown syntax and while we do use it predominantly for spitting out documentation and guides and whatnot, its usefulness far exceeds the original intent. And that’s okay.
Funny. I am in the process of providing basic training on Markdown to our support staff. I think more than 80% of what we now write is in Markdown format. It is easy to read/write for humans. And AI.
Yeah, I understand that it might get confusing to use multiple implementations, or to transition between the two, but I seriously doubt these claims that “regular people” (as in, people who are expected to know how to use Word) are struggling with the syntax itself.
The article pretends that Markdown got popular because “it was there”. 15 years ago people were adopting it _because_ it is dead simple, unobtrusive, and visually evocative.
The ones who made it popular, in other words, did so quite intentionally.
Fully agree. Obsidian, NotePlan, etc. are popular because their storage format is markdown, and you have access to the files, EVEN without exporting
Markdown on iOS doesn’t even make very much sense in terms of keyboard strokes
I love Apple notes and being able to export to Markdown is useful for generating LLM context and for vender neutral backup. I hope there is an Export All Notes option.
Markdown 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.
Biggest advantage of markdown is that it is directly understandable using llm, as it is native text format, all others cannot be copy pasted and fed to llm and you have to write some translation between them.
I wonder how to import markdown into Notes
There's a couple Apple Shortcuts actions to convert to/from Markdown and Rich Text for Notes, but I can't get them to work correctly.
Mr. Gruber was certainly one of the inventors of Markdown but has rested on the laurels ever since. Remember that the late Aaron Schwartz was the co-inventor of Markdown. So let's not give Mr. Gruber too much attention for his opinions on how Markdown has evolved because he's chosen not to participate in its development or adoption.
Indeed, he is far more likely to let loose a tirade of anti-Trump sentiment, and in that regard he comes across as a terribly damaged individual. His opinions are many, and so we cannot give them too much weight.
We must have balance in The Force.
Well, there is no great way to import nicely formatted text into Notes, not even with Shortcuts. Respect to Gruber, but if Apple supports Markdown in Notes, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
Why is there no way in Notes to insert the current date easily?
So often I need to go back to a note, and add some time stamped update at the end.
Am I the only one?
No. Notes fails on many basic things, this is just one example.
My original description of what it is still stands: “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
Yes, that's how John Gruber defines it. But like every creation you share with others, it can evolve. If popular, it will evolve. People create their own versions and uses and intentions with it.
I've used markdown for 12 years or so, for two reasons:
1. As a way to write plain text but still get visual layout cues without using a proprietary format/tool (e.g., Word).
2. Have options for later conversion to other formats/outputs (for Gruber, HTML.)
So for me, writing markdown on my Apple device means that instead of using Apple's proprietary format, I have another place to write plain text markdown and use/share it elsewhere (which I often do).
Gruber is Markdown's father but the overall Markdown community has stopped listening to him a long time ago. Doesn't help that he hasn't fixed the bugs in his Perl script since 2004.
Indeed. His post says:
That's because his specification is loose, and there are no test-cases nor updates to clarify ambiguities.Looking forward to markdown support! I’d love something like what Notion does for input using markdown
This will make working with Google Docs easier, as they can copy&paste from Markdown.
Sweet, just what I needed.
This will make it even easier to migrate all my Apple Notes™ to Obsidian.
What's the strictest type of markdown that can be serialized into a yaml/json ?
If a strict subset can have 2-way-conversion to json through yaml, then markdown can be an effective json editor for the lay person.
I'd love to see Markdown support in MS OneNote...
OneNote feels like such a laggard in this space. They don't even have support for code blocks
And it's odd because Teams has first class support for many Markdown elements. I wrap code blocks in "```" all the time.
It's main reason why I want Markdown within text blocks TBH
I was a heavy user of MS OneNote. It got slower and slower as I added more notes. And some notes got long. And then I discovered Obsidian with Markdown support. Now the idea of using OneNote sends shivers down my spine.
I have some big notes and tbh I find it totally fine (on macOS)
The two things that would make a world of difference to me are:
- having a 'code block' style, preferably accessed via familiar single and triple-backticks markdown syntax - for the Android app to have a "magnifying cursor" like mobile apps are all supposed to have... trying to edit a note and drag the cursor around with your finger without having the little magnifying popup is a complete pain
OneNote lets you add content in a canvas. It would be cool if there was an ASCII canvas note taking tool but I think it would have to be built on plain text from the ground up.
Yeah I meant just within the individual text blocks, the canvas itself can't be Markdown of course
It's such a more convenient way of "styling while you type" and has become the de facto way to do that... in Slack, Reddit comments, GitHub, Jira, Confluence etc... even MS Teams, they all allow Markdown "styling while you type"
I may be in the minority here, but I really don't want Notes to become a markdown editor. I enjoy the Rich Text editors far more. I find myself agreeing with Gruber this time.
> It’s trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax
Not helped by Gruber’s refusal to bless a specific well-specified Markdown flavor, leaving us to deal with all the undefined behavior of his original implementation.
I wish Obsidian gained similar marketing as Apple Notes is getting at WWDC.
> 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 #.
More discussion:
Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183923
Now do Journal exports too and I'll actually use the app.
I 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.
> For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines
I feel like this is why a lot of us use Markdown/Org, because this is the most annoying issue in Word to me since 2003. Why are the indentation rules so arbitrary?
I don’t use word processors often (less than once a year in general), and did something comparatively advanced in LibreOffice Writer a few months ago, involving mixing English and an Indian language, and trying to use styles and such (equivalent to tacking on a stylesheet in HTML). I learned that the toolbar button for lists creates a list with hard-coded inline styles for bullet appearance, indent amounts, &c. If you want to change it, you can’t use that button any more, and have to make your own style with the appropriate properties (not easy) and apply them to each list item.
Part of the mess is that it doesn’t seem to actually model lists, just paragraphs which might have a list level associated with them. I have no idea why this was ever deemed acceptable: it precludes multiple markers on one line:
My guess is that LibreOffice inherited this limitation from Word. No idea if Word is so affected.Indenting and unindenting on iOS is one of my favorite features — you can just swipe right and left on lines to indent and unindent.
I've not experienced any issues unindenting but not sure how you're doing it?
On macOS, tab and shift-tab always work for me.
Markdown is the native formatting of large language models. As such, support for it will be everywhere in the coming years.
I suspect LLMs, not users, have been the requesting this feature at Apple.
That's actually a nice perk since I have LLMs summarize or re-word my research findings quite often. I'm a disorganized person, so they've been a big help with me organizing my work.
I also like that Markdown is being added since it's what I typically use for documentation (github, etc). The default formatting in notes currently leaves something to be desired...
Shortcuts has Rich Text -> Markdown and Markdown -> Rich Text actions.
I made a couple quick shortcuts to go both ways, with the clipboard as both the input and output. I put a widget for this on my desktop and it makes it pretty easy. Not as easy as native support, but not bad.
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 wrapped in `backticks`.
For those who don't know, you can tap on the link preview graphic and select "Convert to Text Link" to switch back to clickable text. As you mention there's no way to change the automatic behavior but at least it is possible to switch back to text links on a case-by-case basis.
THANK YOU
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
This is useful, thanks!
Glad it's helpful! I didn't go super far with it, but maybe it can inspire someone else to dig in and flesh it out.
If you want a Mac email program that renders Markdown, definitely checkout MailMate[1]. Indie developer, has already shipped a lot of updates this year.
[1]: https://freron.com
Interestingly (to me) the SwiftUI Text element supports Markdown natively via AttributedString.
I just do this:
<yourlink.com> and it sends it as a regular link without the bubble
Instead of Markdown, add support for editing links with text, like word processors have.
John Gruber, creator of markdown, wrong about markdown again. (https://airsource.co.uk/blog/2014/09/04/markdown-has-been-st...)
Alternatively: Giant Apple nerd is bemused to see Apple implementing something he created.
I mean it’s lot like he’s touting some fringe thing just because he made it. It must be so weird to see markdown become the lingua franca of everything from online forums to LLMs.
As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author.
Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.
It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark.
And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites, but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff especially thankless.
And then there is GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown), which is a bit different from Common Mark.
At the time of the SM/CM/CommonMark kerfuffle a decade ago, Gruber was quite explicit that "X Flavored Markdown" was perfectly fine with him— Atwood even includes the relevant podcast snippet:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
Honestly the whole thing is so ridiculous.
The thing he’s wrong about is not the name, it’s that markdown doesn’t need a standard. Markdown absolutely needed a spec, and gruber resisted that which is why the spec was done without him and has to be confusingly called CommonMark instead of just being markdown.
That’s what they did in the end: https://commonmark.org/
By this logic, since Ritchie died in 2011, you cannot have a "Standard C" because it's not from the author
We don’t! We have ANSI and ISO C.
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.
GFM predates microsoft’s acquisition of github by one year as a formal spec and six years as an informal one - but ms hardly has a monopoly on embrace-extend-extinguish.
Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very simple process, which is to delete them and just remember everything.
Not sure if you're serious, but you made me laugh, so have an upvote.
I'm one of those people who went pretty hard into the whole "Second Brain" movement (using Apple Notes first, then Obsidian).
~6000 notes later and I've started finding the whole thing overwhelming and pointless at the same time. The vast majority of notes I have don't need to be noted down. At most they could have been a journal entry rather than a separate, curated piece.
Usually I hear something like "excessive noting means you're less likely to try to commit something to memory because you know it's there when you need it". (This is touted as an advantage of the Second Brain concept, incidentally.)
But I've actually found something different as well: excessive noting means you're actively engaging with significantly more information, and most of it is designed to be (or at least should be considered) ephemeral. Noting so much of it down is effectively the digital equivalent of hoarding junk, and the mental/memory repercussions are similar to the physical repercussions of hoarding actual junk.
With (most) note taking systems, you’re supposed to periodically “clean house/review”, which among other things, avoids the problem you’re describing. I don’t do it often myself tbf.
I'm sure this in jest, but my real answer: I remember so much more when I have notes to look back on. I store mine as some YYYY-MM-DD-Notes.txt and edit via local web UI or terminal/SSH. It's a blast to browse and see what I was thinking and doing, and how I've changed over time.
I save working knowledge elsewhere as Topic.md in subfolders so I can remember how I deployed an app or fixed a recurring issue etc.
I sort of understand the mindset that elaborate notetaking systems are a waste of time because 95 percent or more never gets used but the value of something like Apple Notes for tiny details that are both necessary and relatively tough to remember seems hard to dispute. Do you memorize things like part numbers, confirmation numbers, and dimensions?
(If this is a joke, well, I salute your dry humor.)
This but seriously. I find the vast majority of things I need to remember are better remembered by doing just enough of the research I did initially over again to jog my memory, I never read anything I write down again anyway. Although most of the knowledge work I do is programming, and I do write a lot of comments in the code or issue tracker so I guess that counts.
https://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.
I'm still mad Apple Notes became unusable for me at some point due to iCloud fucking it up
it has thousands of thousands of unrelated files in the notes db.
The app just crashes mostly or is super-slow unusable
Apple used to be UX king, now its a joke.
> Apple used to be UX king
Was this before or after the spinning beach balls?
Personally, I just want the ability to export from the stock iOS Notes app as plaintext at all. Currently I need to copy/paste my notes into my own editor or dump them .pdf and extract. I won't even be using markdown, I just want simple local-first backup.
I’m surprised to see a DF article here. I thought he was black listed
Well, there's this: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
Not sure if it's a blacklist as much as people insta-flagging, as happens with a many of the political-adjacent posts.
that blog post isn't really convincing.
> Occasionally I notice a burst of traffic to Daring Fireball from Hacker News. It’s always short-lived, because for reasons I’ve never seen explained, Daring Fireball articles always get blacklisted from Hacker News once they hit their front page
It seems to me that he concludes that he's blacklisted because the traffic coming from Hacker News is short-lived?
> Daring Fireball articles seemed more or less appropriately popular there. Articles that I would think would resonate with the HN readership would hit, and get what always seemed to me an appropriate number of comments.
So this guy seems to think that he can predict what will be popular and what will not? I think he's burying the lede here, who cares about being blacklisted, this guy can tell the future !
Isn't it much more likely that his posts are just less popular, and drive less engagement than he hopes? Most people (even very smart people) are bad at meta-cognition, and are likely to fall in the trap of reasoning based on (hidden) assumptions.
If this guy actually has evidence of being blacklisted/botted I would be open to see it, but lack of engament isn't that.
There is a whole pile of dang comments about this brouhaha, he wasn't 'blacklisted', that's just something Gruber imagined because his articles don't do all that well on HN these days. People become less popular without HNs help.
I think he thinks he's blocklisted. I imagine he's very much not, and it just happenstance/coincidence.
There's a flamewar detector, which triggers when there are far more comments than upvotes.
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Oh, pshaw. I can despise both at the same time, thank you very much.
"People that dislike X must think Y" is reductive and divisive.
He probably was blacklisted in some way and his recent complaints (which attracted a fair amount of attention here) probably led to dang et al reconsidering.
I can’t imagine there are a lot of Stallman-types here. After all, HN is the discussion forum for Y Combinator, a startup accelerator and VC group.
Cognitive dissonance is easy to overcome, if you want to.
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Shovels aren’t great for digging holes. That’s what spades are for. Shovels are good for filling holes.
I think I’ve missed the point.
Does the appearance of this on the front page mean that DF is no longer blacklisted?
The site was never blacklisted.
I've seen this blog linked pretty often actually, so I don't know why people think that he was blacklisted
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I for one am pumped about this. I hate the styling of notes, but love every other aspect of it.
It seems sort of odd to have an “export to markdown” command. Markdown is nice… because it is sort of like a normal markup language, but easier to write, right? But exporting is specifically the one case where markdown’s strength doesn’t matter. The computer can type, like, real fast and can output verbose and niche syntax easily.
Why not export to the best format, LaTeX? I don’t think anyone could argue that Markdown is better than LaTeX as long as you don’t actually have to write it.
100% agree with the sentimment. markdown is hell as a format for editors :D
the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST that rich text editor frameworks reliably operate on takes months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into parsing and serializing markdown :/
Anyhow, we took the learnings from the Markdown editor app and created "zettel" as a result: https://github.com/opral/monorepo/tree/main/packages/zettel/.... The goal is to have an interoperable rich text AST—basically Markdown but with an AST spec.