It’s a silly game to play. Firefox did something similar. Their versioning moved famously slow, then all the sudden they started releasing major versions every other week until their version numbering was compatible to Chrome’s version.
(Wait, I am.)
Embedded files (photos, video, audio, PDFs, etc.) and bullet hierarchies were the two things that I remember being the most trouble; you can copy bullet hierarchies from iOS Notes and paste them into another app, but they aren’t detected when copying the note via Shortcuts. Embedded files had to be manually saved. I think you could Airdrop notes to a MacOS device, but it would wipe the date created metadata from what I remember.
You just connect the account and turn on the notes synchronisation (right below calendar synchronisation).
Apple Notes is not intended for people who want to own their data and have control over export
I really wish Apple would revisit third-party server support with something more modern, such as a Markdown + file hosting backend (over WebDAV or whatever they currently consider the cool way of file sharing), but I'm not holding my breath.
Just tested and embedded images do seem to be supported?
("insert photo" -> add photo -> photo is stored as a MIME part on the note)
Which PM comes up with this? And what does a developer thing when they implement this?
“Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years.”
Am I misunderstanding or is that the feature you were asking for? If not then what does the article mean by export?
I’m still holding out for a phone I can use as a general-purpose computer, though, so take that for what it’s worth.
If so then the UK does not have E2E Notes.
https://support.apple.com/en-la/102537#:~:text=Open%20Notes%...
I applaud the effort simonw put into this, it works great on macOS... the platform AppleScript runs on.
I try other systems and then I end up wanting the simplicity of notes.
Markdown support is a nice addition and hope this makes it easy to transfer notes with other app faster and an intact formatting across the journey.
However, I use it as a starting entry point for my notes, which are mostly temporary, rough, and ephemeral. These notes are the ones I won’t mind losing and can walk out. Anything important or critical that is added here is eventually moved to a plain-text note (Markdown) elsewhere.
You can have an Apple Notes folder backed by IMAP which lets you get at the notes as `multipart/related; type="text/html"` emails (including media). I use it on my servers for family-controlled email allow/deny lists.
(Definitely more faff to deal with than something like Obsidian or Joplin's Markdown notes though.)
I've also got a test note from late 2020 which is also `text/html; quoted-printable` which suggests at least iOS 14 (I don't think the 15 alphas would have been out by then.)
E.g. with Obsidian your notes are stored into specific directory and it stores files as Markdown in hierarchical way. Then mount this app-specific directory to iSH and use git. Downside is that automatic syncing can be difficult since there is limited amount of time iSH can run in the background.
https://zapier.com/blog/export-apple-notes/
There are ways to export, definitely not as straightforward as other tools.
Edit: The article has since been corrected.
Overall, I'm surprised to see markdown become mainstream so quickly.
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/03/exclusive-ios-26-messages-car...
They are rebranding it to reflect the year, à la FIFA 26
I think there is a bifurcation of people who like markdown and people who like rich text. And both groups have strong opinions. Apple Notes was my goto rich text editor. Fingers crossed that they aren't making this worse for us.
Related: I switched away from Bear notes because personally I find markdown hideous to look at. This post made me go back and check on it today and it looks like Bear notes now supports hiding markdown right after you type it. This seems like a really good compromise, though I still don't like that I see it when I place my cursor on it. Worth a shot if you're a "never markdown" person like me.
[1]: https://whatever.com
I find formatting after the fact a lot easier too. Bold a line? cmd+shift-right and then cmd+b. Trying to add formatting after the fact with markdown isn't fun. Though many editors try to helpfully insert markdown for you with hotkeys, it often fails on multi-line things.
I take all of my notes on ChatGPT now, and for more structured data I have built specialized tools/agents, and even small front ends like for my portfolio management track.
It’s crazy how different my world used to be back then; note apps feel so primitive now.
If I need to just write and don’t want feedback, i tell ChatGPT to not reply until I say so, and I will just write in the most lazy and disparaged way, a true brain dump, When I am ready, ChatGPT will sort out my thoughts.
If conversations get too large I summarize everything that’s important and migrate to another conversation.
I can't even imagine what this even means.
¹ well that and the iOS redesign.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/03/sdw-physicality...
That's a shame. I was hoping for at least the option to edit in markdown (and praying for LaTeX support too)
This gave me the belly laugh I needed, thanks!
In some contexts, JSX and markdown are also competing.
I think HTML is the true winner.
Which opens the question, is there a real advantage in using Markdown with AI instead of HTML? Or did nobody ever tried this?
Oh wait, maybe it's 30% of it is repeated...
That keyboard was such a POS that a Wall Street Journal writer did a feature story on it without correcting any of the mistakes the keyboard introduced. It was essentially illegible. Then the Web site had buttons that you could push to remove each kind of error and make it legible: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/apple-still-hasnt-fixed-its-mac...
You can make words *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~, and, if you must, +strike-through+.
The official manual states equals is used for =verbatim= quotes: https://orgmode.org/manual/Emphasis-and-Monospace.html
1. Collapsible headlines and headline search.
2. Executable source code blocks (for notebook style work).
3. TODO states.
4. Time tracking and clock tables.
5. Table formulas.
6. Inline LaTeX and document generation in general.
Now 1 is just an editor feature, and some of these others could be, too. But I wish Markdown was more powerful, extensible, or less ubiquitous.
What bothers me most about Org Mode is that support is pretty limited outside Emacs. We use it as a wiki replacement at my company, for that integrations into other editors are kinda good enough. But there's some areas like reporting only Emacs users can realistically work on. GitLab (and Forgejo, which we recently switched to) render Org pretty nicely, so it's easy to consume in a browser. But editing is a different story.
So I guess I wish for either a less complex (and thus easier to support) Org, or a more powerful Markdown.
This of course ends up being editor specific, but if org has the same limitation, by being tied to emacs, is it really any different? I think what emacs has going for it in this case is that it’s been around for decades, and we can assume it will continue to be around for decades into the future. The markdown editor de jour may not be.
Either Markdown++ or Org Lite. I'll take either :) I'm not a fan of coupling formats and tools tightly.
I also like [Markdown's text first](https://hyperlink.com) then link format much more than [[https://hyperlink.com][Orgmode's link first then text]].
But for the life of me, there are so many things I hate about Markdown:
- Alternative syntax for _italic_ *italic* and __bold__ **bold** (why?)
- versus using /italic/ and *bold*. It just feels so right
- You need to use HTML tags <u>to underline</u>, or <s>strikethrough</s>, or just about anything in Markdown (including line breaks! You need to use the <br> tag)
- +strikethrough+ is alright, but _underline_ just makes sense
- Lack of a unified Markdown standard:
- Diminishes portability (e.g. varying approaches for file meta tags like in Obsidian)
- Causes different renderings of the same document (e.g. Obsidian vs GitHub)
- There was a serious standardization effort in 'Standard Markdown', only for the original creator to be a knob about it: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/
Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
A ten minute web search would have revealed it was already a solved problem, instead of splintering and inventing a new 'standard'. But that was somehow too much effort.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/refs/heads/master/...
When the original is in markdown, it's somehow always noticeable.
It's the new classic example of "worse is better".
Other markups may be more well thought out and more complete, but Markdown beats them hands down on usability.
Consider the comparison between MD and RST, for example...
You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with?
After much searching I finally ended up with Marked, on the Mac. A paid app. But that's about it for options. And no, I'm not talking about text editors that offer a "preview" pane that you can optionally invoke. I'm talking about a simple reader for Markdown that renders it, so you're not reading a shitty text file with a bunch of formatting codes in it. Why bother putting them in, if nothing parses and acts on them?
Browsers read html. You're supposed to read markdown with a browser by rendering it to html and reading the html.
Or, from the other angle, with Markdown being found in so many places, why aren't there popular viewers for it?
The preview is really only needed if there is advanced formatting or HTML in there. A basic markdown doc should be easy to read in plain text.
And I don't want an extra "preview" pane. That was the specific complaint. Nor do I want these docs in my IDE at all. I want all the available space in my IDE for code.
Again, why have this format all over the place when there are vanishingly few VIEWERS for it? Or vice versa?
If you're on macOS though, the best option for rendered Markdown is a quicklook plugin. There are a few around - I like [1] though.
What is your alternative to Markdown here?
If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?
It's not "clutter" it's meaningful information for the human eye in plain text.
Which is why I'm asking: what's your alternative? Is it no headers, no lists, no standard * or \_ for emphasis, as it has been done long before Markdown existed?
My "alternative" is to have DEDICATED, lightweight Markdown viewers. The major OSes have long come with a simple text-file viewer that can render RTF. Why not Markdown?
In the meantime, I'm mystified as to why the format is so rampant when there is so little support for it.
Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.
An update to Microsoft Notepad which renders Markdown is currently being rolled out: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...
I'm not sure I agree *something* is intuitive for italic and **something else** is intuitive for bold, or that this is intuitively a block quote:
> #### The quarterly results look great!
>
> - Revenue was off the chart.
> - Profits were higher than ever.
> > Everything is going according to *plan*.
This is information people often want in a plain text file, and having a common way to signal those things is beneficial when working on teams or sharing with others.
What’s the alternative? Everyone makes up their own bespoke way of formatting their text file that works for them, then has a key to explain it in their doc?
Every source control website I've used will render Markdown as HTML for you.
Ah, so that's the definition of a "loaded question." Thanks for the fallacy!
"Loaded Question: A loaded question contains an assumption that may or may not be true or agreed upon. It's designed to trap the respondent into confirming a premise they might not agree with, regardless of their answer.
Complex Question Fallacy (or plurium interrogationum): This is a logical fallacy where the question presumes the truth of something that may be false or unproven. Answering it directly implies agreement with that presupposition."
The IDE that I use most of the time also renders markdown.
And because of the lack of such readers, everyone just reads the plain text with a bunch of garbage in it. It's just gallingly dumb.
That's what documentation generators are for, to render all the docs and search them if you're just a user.
Your pretension that most programming involves writing Markdown "source code" is absurd. I neither want nor need Markdown in any of my source-code editors, ever. Not once in decades of professional programming have I missed it.
And if I do need to create Markdown, I will want to do so in a simple WYSIWIG editor and save it as MD. Again... not in my IDE.
And how often are you even reading READMEs? For me it's usually once, when I first use a library, because it typically gives an outline of the project and/or instructions on how to install it. So I'm reading it in a browser.
Meanwhile I'm updating my own READMEs often, usually using them as a sort of to-do list and then outlining existing functionality.
Like, are you really using so many libraries as glue that reading READMEs is such a common task that you specifically want it in your IDE? Is that the current state of programming?
Are you being intentionally obtuse? I said that's exactly what I DON'T want.
.gitignore or .ignore file...
text on the left, render on the right pane
example: https://imgur.com/9rjoMa2.png
It's even dumber when you ponder: What is this a "preview" of? How the document will look in... a nonexistent viewer?
Thank you for pointing me to the MarkItDown library [1]. I had no idea such a thing existed.
And if you doubt me on that last point, look at things like callouts in Obsidian, clearly people want to be able to do more but we keep tacking weird formatting extensions onto Markdown.
Edit: I fell for the headline. This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown. So close, yet so far.
It mentions it’s a universal binary, but considering it mentions support for OS X 10.4 - 10.7, I have a feeling it is PPC/Intel universal, not Intel/ARM.
I see the GitHub has some more recent updates, but still 5 years old.
Oof, I got really excited about this for half a day or so...
Maybe worth changing the headline?
I’ve been converting from Apple Notes to Obsidian and it’s been pretty painful. Everything is just slightly off, in inconsistent ways, where I need to clean up every note manually. I’m deep enough into it that adding the feature now won’t do me much good, but might be helpful if I want to use notes for quick capture and then maybe export to Obsidian if I want to save it.
Then I remember that some people's jobs is just to guess what Apple will do next.
I assume, they’ll start following a year of release both for macOS and iOS, so it would be easier to know for non-techies. But my first reaction was ‘em, 8 years into the future? Looks weird, isn’t it? Maybe that’s some kind of a joke.’
I only found out yesterday if that helps. Makes some kind of sense now they're on a regular yearly update cycle.
It's speculation at the moment (macrumors.com), it hasn't been officially announced yet.
But thanks for clarifying!
that's not going to happen
We were doing years without abbreviation before the numbers went from 80s and 90s to 00s.
Everyone knew what "Product 95" was, or "Product 97".
But then "Product 0" or "Product 2" didn't work, so vendors switched to major versions instead of years.
A quarter century later, we're reviving the year as version thing.
Apple is reportedly going to rename all of its operating systems (theverge.com)
13 points by thesuperbigfrog 7 days ago | 7 comments
I agree with the person you are responding to though, I would really prefer if 'match style' was the default OS-wide, and there was an option to preserve formatting with a hotkey instead.
I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.
It’s a choice though, it’s not like they aren’t the richest company in the world.
Just focus on a core and let third-party apps do what they're good at.
Now it’s done for momentum.
The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.
>> I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
Isn't this the default behaviour in all rich text apps? I think CMD+SHFT+OPTION+V pastes without preserving formatting.
I have three notes that exhibit the bug you mention though: the three notes I keep for each of my children's artwork. I scan the artwork using the document scanning tool in Notes, and it gets embedded as a multi-page PDF (if the artwork itself has multiple parts) or a single PDF. After many years of adding high-res scans, when I scroll to the bottom of these files it takes some time for the note to render. I think I picked the wrong tool for the job here, more than anything!
And oh.. the obligatory:
MarkText™ - For The First Time In An Apple App
It’s powered by org plain text, but Markdown is coming too.
Edit: you don’t need to know org markup today to use Journelly. It’s an implementation detail. Here’s a happy user https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
buried the lede a bit there
https://gist.github.com/vimtaai/99f8c89e7d3d02a362117284684b...
But my guess is Apple will invent a new dialect called
iDown oder AppleDown.
;-)
bonaldi•1d ago
Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too.
Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that is great, so long as I don't have to ever see, use or be aware of it.
divbzero•1d ago
BrandonSmith•1d ago
It is possible reporting is getting this wrong and the Markdown feature and it is just to serve use case above. As an example, Google Docs recently enabled "Paste from Markdown" that also is a huge convenience.
geerlingguy•1d ago
This just makes it so I don't have to stare at a bunch of random characters and can have actual formatting. A win in my book!
candiddevmike•1d ago
AIUI it's only Markdown export support for now
markbao•1d ago
derefr•1d ago
Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.
ninkendo•1d ago
iOS lets you double tap to start a text selection now. I don’t know when this started. I’m 99% sure I used to long-press to start a text selection, and that it would start highlighting the word under the little preview bubble. My muscle memory is still to do this when I want to highlight text; it just never works and I always get frustrated.
Maybe if I start remembering to double tap to highlight text, the text editing experience might actually start to be passable? :shrug:
(Yes, I know about long pressing the keyboard to use it as a trackpad. I do that most of the time, but it’s still fiddly, it very very often misinterprets a tap and starts text selection wildly off from where I wanted it to, and the only fix is to tap around in the text area.)
eviks•1d ago
ninkendo•23h ago
But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari.
That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not.
So it’s not that they changed something, it’s that the behavior is different for editable vs noneditable text, and my brain keeps doing the wrong one. Maybe now that I know about double tapping my brain can finally have a complete picture of the behavior split and I can stop fucking it up each time.
(Although I’m still pretty certain that doing a brief long press, but not long enough for the magnifying glass to show up, used to select a word of text. I can’t prove this though. Maybe I’m remembering the Force Touch days when you used to be able to do a Force Touch while long pressing to expand selection. That would make sense with the timeline.)
eviks•23h ago
> When you’re typing, you canalso double-tap to select a word. In read-only documents, such as webpages, or email or text messages you’ve received, touch and hold to select a word.
Also, double tapping selects by words in editable notes vs by letter in read-only, so the OS will continue to fight you feeble attempts at trying to have a consistent experience!
int_19h•2h ago
eviks•1d ago
oh, indeed, that's true even for simple movements: you tap somewhere, the cursors jumps there momentarily and then jumps back. You tap again, same thing. So the system knows what you want, but just "competently" engineered in a way to ignore you...
al_borland•1d ago
I can’t understand people who use an iPad full time. My dad does this and I don’t know how he does drive himself mad with all the taps required to do basic things.
eviks•1d ago