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Apple Notes Expected To Gain Markdown Support (daringfireball.net) 27

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
According to 9to5Mac, "Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years." Apple enthusiast and co-creator of the Markdown markup language, John Gruber, is not a fan. From a blog post: Some people find this surprising, but I personally don't want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: "Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers." Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick's, from the documentation for Pollen: "Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML."

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 can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown "everywhere." It's quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a "Markdown editor," even as an option. It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn't be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes. [...]

But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude -- PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.
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Apple Notes Expected To Gain Markdown Support More

Apple Notes Expected To Gain Markdown Support

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  • Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude ...

    With most of Apple's offerings (not just Notes), I think the biggest problem is just how far behind everyone else they are with regards to sharing. It took forever for them to add the ability to share *at all*, and even now the functionality seems like it was bolted on in a half-assed manner.

    • Searching, as well For some reason, recently searching even for explicit literal terms, that I KNOW are in my notes returns zero results. For example I have a note of some servers and details, i search for the hostname or the ip (which is in the note) and nothing turns up. I have to search for 'web server' which is also in the note for it to find the note. It's utterly braindead. Notes should be a first tier search target. Another example of Apples quality sucking and degrading the user experience.

      Wh

  • I use Notes with my Dovecot IMAP server. It works, but sync is oftentimes VERY slow. You can speed it up by going to the calendar app and refreshing the calendars (which is odd, because my calendars are on a totally separate CALDAV server).

    It's been like this for many years. I realize I'm in the minority of notes users but reporting the bug doesn't seem to help much either.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Apple doesn't care for minority users like me. Others and I are old school who still use local USB sync. We don't use iClouds. macOS Calendar sync broke (not updating since macOS Ventura) between iPhones and MacOS' Calendar. :(

  • I'd rather have Treasury Notes

  • At the risk of invoking the Death of the Author trope, I don't agree with him here (and I note that he leaves that open too, by saying he personally doesn't want to and not excluding others from wanting to)..

    Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tabl
  • One other thing markdown is good for is communicating semi-styled text with AI systems without clogging their limited context windows or allocated tokens with excess formatting code. Even though they don't work in markdown natively, they have to process all the information you give them and translate it into something they can use internally. Exporting your copy into markdown from something like Typora can give you much more context or thinking tokens per-window to work on your book or research paper, espec
  • Meanwhile, there's way better Obsidian already doing this natively.
  • The headline is, at best, misleading as nowhere is it implied that Apple Notes is gaining Markdown support but merely the ability to export Notes in Markdown. This is further compounded by stating that Gruber “is not a fan” of adding this ability in the lead paragraph. While Gruber doesn’t support being able to use Markdown in Notes (which is not what is being reported), he clearly states that he is a fan of allowing Notes to export in Markdown: "But Markdown export from Notes? That sound

  • Adding Markdown support to Notes is about exactly one thing: Enabling LLMs, via tool calls, to create formatted notes on the user's device.

    And how do LLMs universally create formatted text? Markdown. This is completely about Apple Intelligence and having it create Notes.

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