Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19?
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.’
Terretta · 1d ago
To be fair, the news didn't get a ton of interest here last week:
Apple is reportedly going to rename all of its operating systems (theverge.com)
13 points by thesuperbigfrog 7 days ago | 7 comments
> Instead of just notching up the version number, Apple will instead mark them by year. However, the numbers will apparently align with the year after the one the update is actually released in, similar to cars. That means that the next big iOS update will be iOS 26 instead of iOS 19.
I also thought the article would be a joke about an obvious feature never arriving.
tonyedgecombe · 1d ago
>Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19?
It's speculation at the moment (macrumors.com), it hasn't been officially announced yet.
WA · 1d ago
I looked for April 1st as a date. Next thought: the "news" is about an LLM writing these articles and messed something up.
But thanks for clarifying!
zimpenfish · 1d ago
> Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19?
I only found out yesterday if that helps. Makes some kind of sense now they're on a regular yearly update cycle.
piperswe · 1d ago
Haven't they been on a yearly update cycle since the start?
AdamN · 1d ago
It will continue to be yearly but now all the OS numbers will be the same (the most important part) and require little inside knowledge to know if it's new or old (only a geek would know that iOS 15 was released in 2024 for instance, the new method will be more like car model years).
I’m pretty sure Samsung did the same with their S series phones a few years back. Nobody seemed to mind.
apples_oranges · 1d ago
19 + 7 = 26, lucky number 7!
wltr · 1d ago
Haha, nice finding!
basisword · 1d ago
Nobody knows yet, it's just a rumour. But year-based versioning makes sense as these products continue to develop and the version numbers get higher. Even as an iOS developer, I've lost track of the phone versions at this point. Year-based versioning would be so much easier. Saying that I hope it's "iOS '26" and not "iOS 26".
Terretta · 1d ago
We'd made this change before, then dropped it when we hit the "year zero" problem.
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.
basisword · 1d ago
We had Windows 2000 :) I look forward to Window 95 (v2) in 70 years. Number versioning is fine until you are releasing a new OS every year. Same with the phones. It's just too hard to keep track of at a certain point for consumers. yyyy.mm.dd style versioning is much better when you're releasing at the rate companies do these days imo.
SSLy · 1d ago
> Saying that I hope it's "iOS '26" and not "iOS 26".
that's not going to happen
rTX5CMRXIfFG · 1d ago
Is critical thinking really so dead that people take rumors to be the truth?
lurk2 · 1d ago
I would not recommend investing in the iOS Notes ecosystem. There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud. If you need a note-taking app, go with Joplin instead; it supports Markdown, has both iOS and desktop clients, and supports self-hosted syncing.
The shortcuts app can access the text from your Apple Notes on iOS. You can set up a shortcut to export all of your notes to files, Dropbox, etc.
leakycap · 1d ago
Of course not, no developer has access to Notes on iOS for export except
I applaud the effort simonw put into this, it works great on macOS... the platform AppleScript runs on.
divbzero · 1d ago
You can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.
leakycap · 1d ago
This is great until you edit your notes on IMAP from more than one app. Apple Notes, Outlook, Gmail, and others with access to IMAP notes will corrupt one another's entries very easily. Style is also very difficult to control in this setup.
Apple Notes is not intended for people who want to own their data and have control over export
lurk2 · 1d ago
Interesting. Did they add this feature recently? How do you set it up?
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.
lblume · 1d ago
No, in fact it is available since iOS 4 (2010).
You just connect the account and turn on the notes synchronisation (right below calendar synchronisation).
dunham · 1d ago
I wrote python code to extract the notes years ago[1], but it's bit-rotted, so it no longer supports tables, raw stroke data, or the newer features like equations. Maybe I'll update it someday, but I'm not using notes at the moment and have too many other things going one.
New term to add to the lexicon... bit-rot. I like it.
spike021 · 1d ago
I just checked and my google account’s earliest synced note is from 2011. it shows up in the Notes app as a separate section from the iCloud one.
Spooky23 · 1d ago
It’s been there for several years.
OptionOfT · 1d ago
But for some reason the action center quick note create button doesn't work when your default notes account is not iCloud.
Which PM comes up with this? And what does a developer thing when they implement this?
zimpenfish · 1d ago
> This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio)
Just tested and embedded images do seem to be supported?
("insert photo" -> add photo -> photo is stored as a MIME part on the note)
lxgr · 1d ago
And no formatting whatsoever.
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.
Brajeshwar · 1d ago
I love Apple Notes for being easy and “just works” within the Apple Ecosystem. Easy to share with family, notes updated across devices, etc.
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.
I just use it like I would a physical notepad. Throwaway notes, shopping lists, measurements, etc.
plufz · 1d ago
I use Obsidian these days, I found the switch from Apple Notes pain free. I still think Apple Notes is a great app for almost everyone. Not perfect but really good.
_thisdot · 1d ago
I went this way as well. I used to try and make all my notes in Notion. But found the lack of offline support and the mobile app very limiting. Then I tried Apple Notes with a framework called "Forever Notes". Obsidian does everything Forever Notes does but better.
> There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud.
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.)
beagle3 · 1d ago
Since when? Last time I tried in iOS 16, notes backed by imap were plaintext only.
zimpenfish · 1d ago
Can't give a definitive answer but my allow/deny list parser has always used `MIME::QuotedPrint` through `html2text` to convert them from MIME'd HTML into plain text and that was last updated September 2021.
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.)
nicce · 1d ago
Just a sidenote: you can use Git in iOS as well if you are brave enough.
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.
spike021 · 1d ago
I’ve used my google account for notes for years. The earliest one looks like it was around 2014. Have you tried adding an email address from a platform that supports notes?
duxup · 1d ago
I have the opposite experience.
I try other systems and then I end up wanting the simplicity of notes.
eviks · 1d ago
Unfortunately Joplin is too slow for a niche of short fast notes, but even then better to get another app without a lock in
subjectsigma · 1d ago
From the article:
“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?
makeitdouble · 1d ago
Not parent, but TBF Apple "working" on something means very little in most Apple rumors, and it doesn't seem to touch on iCloud independence.
lurk2 · 1d ago
That would fix the problem if it supported the export of indentation and attachments, but I would still never bother with a proprietary solution when a free-as-in-freedom solution already exists.
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.
basisword · 1d ago
From the article: "The feature would allow users to export text in the markdown format".
xyst · 1d ago
Agree. iOS notes is only good for throwaway thoughts or ephemeral notes
Spooky23 · 1d ago
You’re missing out. It’s a E2E encrypted solution that works really well.
brigandish · 1d ago
Does it rely on iCloud for that? And is the E2E only enabled for Notes if it's enabled in iCloud?
If so then the UK does not have E2E Notes.
_thisdot · 1d ago
It most definitely does. If you're using your gmail account as your AppleID. You can find all your notes unencrypted under a Gmail label called Notes
Spooky23 · 1d ago
You didn’t choose to E2E encrypt them. You can find your unencrypted notes there.
It does not, although you can open notes in iCloud via a browser, and I’m not acquainted with how that functions in the UK (and if it’s available), mostly because I don’t do it.
ale42 · 1d ago
I first thought it was some kind of extrapolation like... at the rate features are currently being added, Markdown will land in ~2032 with iOS 26... just noticed about the new version numbering, I missed that news!
krackers · 1d ago
They must be doing version numbers based on marketing. From OS X, to macOS 11...15, and now macOS 26.
plufz · 1d ago
I think the version number from year is quite good. I keep forgetting which version is new and old with the current system. Now it will be easy to remember if you are lagging behind one year, or two or whatever.
jeeyoungk · 1d ago
Yes; Ubuntu did this from the beginning; (6.06 is the first I've used, and I still remember _when_ I used it), Python's introducing CalVer too (aptly numbered PEP https://peps.python.org/pep-2026/)
Kwpolska · 1d ago
That PEP has been rejected.
jeeyoungk · 1d ago
ah TIL! I only read it when it was first proposed.
JKCalhoun · 1d ago
That or I'm getting really old.
(Wait, I am.)
idk-92 · 1d ago
what do you mean by marketing? it's based on the year the version is pushed now. Which makes alot more sense at the end of the day and helps to know which version came when
al_borland · 1d ago
I’m a fan of year based versioning, but this change is likely a response to Samsung doing this, which makes their Galaxy S25 sound newer and more advanced than the iPhone 16.
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.
int_19h · 12h ago
I think it's far more likely that they're doing it to reflect the fact that their products are essentially updated in synchronized waves, and you have to update all at once to get the best out of it (i.e. across macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS, if you own all those devices). This way each wave gets an obvious number so you know what matches what.
jaoane · 1d ago
It sounded to me like a joke, as in “markdown will be supported on February 30th”. Then I read the article text, which seemed serious, and I was confused.
ale42 · 1d ago
Exactly this.
tlhunter · 1d ago
Microsoft notepad is also getting markdown support. It's a very interesting coincidence!
Overall, I'm surprised to see markdown become mainstream so quickly.
It's not a coincidence at all. Markdown is the "native" language for most LLMs, and the hype around it requires even low-level tools to support it (for both legitimate and marketing reasons)
90s_dev · 1d ago
I thought this was huge news so I posted it here and it got no eyes.
zombot · 1d ago
If you post something even slightly outside the current hype, it's very much hit-and-miss whether it gets eyes. It also depends on day of week and time of day when it was posted. Repeated reposts used to take care of that but they've been made impossible, probably because of spam and abuse.
rk06 · 1d ago
I wish they stopped adding feature to notepad. Or if they really wanted to, create a new app note.exe and add features to it instead.
Kwpolska · 1d ago
The new Notepad is a separate app. The classic Notepad with zero features can still be accessed with some hackery.
Quite honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. It’s been 21 years since one of their biggest evangelists wrote the format!
afavour · 1d ago
Kind of amazed that this was the way I found out about Apple’s new OS versioning system
solardev · 1d ago
You mean you don't bump your semver by 8 major versions when you add markdown exports?
zombot · 1d ago
Not semver any more, it's year numbers now.
yborg · 1d ago
They haven't officially announced it.
nozzlegear · 1d ago
As another commenter said, they haven't officially announced it yet. That said, it's all I've heard about in the Apple world for the last couple of days¹, so it may just be that you don't follow Apple news closely.
¹ well that and the iOS redesign.
zombot · 1d ago
There is an iOS redesign?
nozzlegear · 1d ago
Yeah, also just an unconfirmed rumor until next week, but supposedly it's going to be "glassy."
I made a feature request for this very thing within the latest version cycle. I imagine others have as well. Maybe they listened, maybe they didn’t, but here’s hoping!
Edit: I fell for the headline. This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown. So close, yet so far.
al_borland · 1d ago
Apple Shortcuts already has a Rich Text to Markdown converter out of the box. It was already a quick jump to Markdown using only built-in Apple tools, but maybe this will be a cleaner export.
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.
jonhohle · 1d ago
I should probably go back to Notational Velocity, but am spoiled by iCloud. It’s effectively the perfect scratch pad notes app. Markdown for all content, search is also document creation, great key bindings, sorting by all relevant fields, and fast.
al_borland · 1d ago
I was just thinking about Notational Velocity last week. I went and looked and it seems the latest release is from 2011.
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.
lxgr · 1d ago
> This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown.
Oof, I got really excited about this for half a day or so...
Maybe worth changing the headline?
promiseofbeans · 1d ago
I thought the title was an Onion-esque joke at first, not realising they've changed the naming scheme
qingcharles · 1d ago
I thought it was just a typo, but I assume they've switched to years? Please tell me this won't end up like the Xbox naming scheme.
rootsudo · 1d ago
Me too, me too.
mdeeks · 1d ago
I really hope Apple Notes makes this something that's opt-in and I don't have to see. Thankfully it sounds like it is an export only feature.
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.
candiddevmike · 1d ago
You hate reading unrendered markdown? I've looked at markdown so much that my brain renders it in my head.
Bear’s implementation is great. One thing I hate about rich text is that it's basically impossible to not inherit the formatting of adjacent text if you move your cursor around, nor is it possible to see the current formatting state. If your cursor is between whitespace and an italic word, will inserted text be normal or italic? Markdown’s formatting characters solve this by creating a boundary that the cursor can be on either side of.
eviks · 1d ago
This is a solved problem, but not implemented almost nowhere. Your text cursor can simply show whether text is going to be italic with an indicator. And moving cursor an extra step away from the italicized word will reset the formatting to that of the space char. But also panels in many apps show current formatting in their formatting button state
mdeeks · 1d ago
Interesting, because I find that very intuitive. If my cursor is on or next to formatting, it'll inherit it.
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.
bobbylarrybobby · 1d ago
What does “next to formatting” mean? There's always some formatting on both sides of the cursor.
delduca · 1d ago
Bear app is so damn good at markdown (by default) https://bear.app
bonaldi · 1d ago
> Instead of tapping buttons to bold text or create headers, users could type *bold* or # Header directly into their notes.
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.
BrandonSmith · 1d ago
I tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win.
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.
candiddevmike · 1d ago
> I tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win.
AIUI it's only Markdown export support for now
geerlingguy · 1d ago
Yeah, this would be huge for me; I often toss a bunch of notes into an Apple Notepad note just to have it in my pocket, and everything I write with a keyboard is markdown.
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!
divbzero · 1d ago
Apple Notes is used not only with onscreen keyboards in iOS, but also with physical keyboards in iPadOS and macOS, where familiarity with Markdown input could make it faster than shortcut commands.
markbao · 1d ago
I think it’s user preference. For me it’s easier to get to the punctuation asterisk (basically muscle memory and <0.5s) than to tap the formatting menu, wait for the keyboard sheet to go down and the formatting sheet to go up, tap Bold, then tap the X and wait for animations to complete again (which I have no muscle memory for and need to look at every UI element that I’m tapping).
derefr · 1d ago
But formatting already-typed text on iOS is incredibly fiddly (as you have to select a text span first, and iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this — especially if the span starts or stops at something iOS doesn't consider a "whole token.")
Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.
ninkendo · 1d ago
I was just typing a reply to gush about how much I agree with you and how awful iOS text editing is (I’m on my iPhone at the moment) and decided to play with editing text to get some example complaints, when I had an epiphany:
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
How can you be 99% sure when long press in *edited text* like when writing notes doesn't select, but instead moves the caret with a magnifying glass?
ninkendo · 1d ago
I said I was 99% sure it used to work that way.
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 · 1d ago
hm, here is the original iphone user guide for ios 3.1
> 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 · 12h ago
I also remember the same thing as GP, and I believe I got it from the very first iPad.
al_borland · 1d ago
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like it’s gotten more fiddly with time. Either that or I notice it more, because I’m using the thing more as time goes on.
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
> iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this
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...
eviks · 1d ago
Current
- Tap Aa
- Tap Italic
- Tap close
- Type
- Tap Aa
- Tap Italic (to reset)
- Tap close
Future
- Hold a key to insert asterisk
- Type
- Hold a key to insert asterisk
devinprater · 1d ago
This will be pretty nice for accessibility too. Hopefully this leads to Markdown everywhere in the OS, and that follower-OS' add it too. For accessibility, it's great because I can have my screen reader announce punctuation, so it reads star star this star star, instead of no indication of italics at all. Granted, that could always be made better, using speech parameters like pitch and speed to indicate formatting, but that's not found a good home outside of Emacspeak.
andy_xor_andrew · 1d ago
I'm suspecting this is because future Apple Intelligence features (when they actually get released) will allow LLMs to write notes, and of course we all know markdown is well understood by LLMs.
amai · 1d ago
Which of the many dialects of Markdown will it support?
But my guess is Apple will invent a new dialect called
iDown oder AppleDown.
;-)
zamadatix · 1d ago
The MacRumors article claims Markdown input formatting but they source this from a 9to5Mac article which only seems to claim Markdown exporting.
Edit: The article has since been corrected.
neepi · 1d ago
Markdown export would be appreciated. My number one concern with Notes is that it is 100% opaque file formats (weird serialisation inside SQLite and no api). Backup to markdown would be great.
debuggerson · 1d ago
This might be the stepping stone toward AI integration, as I believe every phone will soon come with an AI agent that helps execute multiple tasks and manage files internally. Just like Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of services mentioned, the future of phones will look very different from what we know now.
I expect it has more function like converting to other formats.
trumbitta2 · 1d ago
What I find outrageous is that it's export-only. No writing in Markdown.
singularity2001 · 1d ago
so very useless
cyberge99 · 1d ago
I switched from Evernote to Upnote and now that I have X-url-callbacks and I can link into notes, I’ve found my note utopia.
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.
kupopuffs · 1d ago
I'm sorry, are you saying that you sent all your notes to ChatGPT as prompts? How do you recall or get your notes back?
DevKoala · 1d ago
For example I have a thread for engineer status updates. I get the call transcripts from an internal app my company developed and I push everything into ChatGPT. When I need to recall something, I just ask ChatGPT. It is much better than indexed search.
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.
edgarvaldes · 1d ago
This is the most alien (to me) workflow that I have ever read in HN. And that includes emacs.
dmd · 1d ago
> I take all of my notes on ChatGPT now
I can't even imagine what this even means.
skinnymuch · 1d ago
I’m also interested in what you mean of how you get your notes back. Sounds interesting.
puttycat · 1d ago
In case anyone else had no idea where the 26 came from:
They are rebranding it to reflect the year, à la FIFA 26
crossroadsguy · 1d ago
I just want to know what are some better iOS keyboards that don't send home everything I type. Because I am pretty sure that shit is not improving.
And oh.. the obligatory:
MarkText™ - For The First Time In An Apple App
bschne · 1d ago
> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly
buried the lede a bit there
RollingRo11 · 1d ago
> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly
That's a shame. I was hoping for at least the option to edit in markdown (and praying for LaTeX support too)
meindnoch · 1d ago
>and praying for LaTeX support too
This gave me the belly laugh I needed, thanks!
RollingRo11 · 1d ago
a guy can (c/h)ope
90s_dev · 1d ago
Sometimes I wonder if there's a place for me in the software economy.
Then I remember that some people's jobs is just to guess what Apple will do next.
rcarmo · 1d ago
Just for export, apparently, so… kind of pointless given the amount of amazing Markdown note taking apps on iOS.
eviks · 1d ago
Instead of going primitive with md would be better to have the rich format more open and widely supported
htk · 1d ago
I hope they also fix the cursor jumping bug when typing on tables. The bug's been there for years.
briandoll · 1d ago
I've been all-in on Bear for iOS and MacOS and have never once missed Apple Notes functionality
dmd · 1d ago
Bear's support of embedded things like pictures and especially PDFs is atrocious compared to Notes, unfortunately.
faizmokh · 1d ago
I would ditch Obsidian in a heartbeat once there's a Markdown support in Apple Notes.
howmayiannoyyou · 1d ago
Notes: I'm stuck with this and wish I could leave, but the combo of security and attachments leaves me with few options. Notes is buggy, lacks interoperability, has crap AI integration, etc. BUT... the real pain is Apple Messages. The inability create folders, rules, etc. is insanity. At a time when most comms are instant why would you not offer users the same level of organization they enjoy with email, or with other IM platforms?
nkmnz · 1d ago
proper access to pdfs already stored in notes would be good, too.
singularity2001 · 1d ago
any conflict with #tags?
BenFranklin100 · 1d ago
Microsoft needs to get to work pronto and add native Markdown support to OneNote.
ChrisArchitect · 1d ago
Here we are 20+ years later..... Imagining an alternate universe where it could have been Textile.
Happy to get markdown support but I really hope the Notes app stays basic and away from LLM drivel.
xyst · 1d ago
Apple really hates any major versions with 9
yapyap · 1d ago
iOS 18 to 26, genius
pvo50555 · 1d ago
I am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times?
I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
ornornor · 1d ago
I think apple cares a lot less than it used to and it’s been like that for a while. There are long standing bugs or missing features on iOS that are just there and have been for years.
I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
michelb · 1d ago
It feels like they are spread way too thin, and individual teams are not allowed to improve their app/services/parts on their own. If I had to work on Apple Notes I would have several suggestions, not all worthy of work of-course, but letting a lot of apps go stagnant is something else entirely.
ornornor · 1d ago
> spread too thin
It’s a choice though, it’s not like they aren’t the richest company in the world.
SebastianKra · 1d ago
Nevermind richtest company. It's like every year they release three new half-baked apps, that will not receive updates in years.
Just focus on a core and let third-party apps do what they're good at.
xattt · 1d ago
Apple used to have to roll-their-own to hedge their bets. For example, Safari and iWork came about when there was a possibility that Microsoft would pull support for IE and Office for Mac.
Now it’s done for momentum.
deegles · 1d ago
it's the consequence of promotion driven development
michelb · 1d ago
Still need people to press buttons though. But I feel too many decisions have to go through a tiny set of people. But I have no insights into the org. I do wish they would do more smaller releases. Like update Notes without a full OS update.
danielscrubs · 1d ago
The more you rely on abstracted (and sometimes leaky) tools—like Swift versus Objective-C, or SwiftUI versus its predecessors—the more likely you are to feel helpless when something goes wrong.
FirmwareBurner · 1d ago
When they're making billions from their cut on app store sales and receiving billions from Google to do nothing, and people buy their devices anyway, why would Apple care?
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.
tonyedgecombe · 1d ago
Shift+Option+Command V pastes plain text on macOS.
quitit · 1d ago
Gripes about missing features which are neither missing nor undocumented is on brand for HN.
I find that combination very annoying to press personally. It's possible to change the hotkey by going to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts ... > App Shortcuts, and then under 'All Applications' adding a shortcut for the menu title 'Paste and Match Style' (I suppose it would be different if the OS language is not set to English).
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.
basisword · 1d ago
I wonder if younger people are aware of keyboard shortcuts? Growing up using primarily phones and tablets it might be less of a thing. I saw a TikTok recently explaining copy/paste shortcuts like it was a hack and people were amazed in the comments.
singularity2001 · 1d ago
please send me your paypal, hero of the day
nik736 · 1d ago
I absolutely agree. I use it daily but it's so buggy and the search is the worst thing about it!
esskay · 1d ago
Seems to be the way with lots of apps Apple produces these days. They do the bare minimum, leave them a decade then quietly add in a feature that should've existed on day one and likely took a single dev a couple of hours to add support for.
bn-l · 1d ago
Have you tried the handwriting recognition? It’ll take you all the way to the newton.
zmb_ · 1d ago
It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.
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.
basisword · 1d ago
I think the fact it's buggy but you still use it daily (when there are so many other options) goes to show how good it is! Personally it's the app I use more than any other. I don't run in to too many issues but I have experienced the one you mention about text disappearing. On Mac there are also some really annoying issues with the dictionary (sometimes it lets me 'learn' a work, other times no option) and grammar checks (completely wrong).
>> 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.
interpol_p · 1d ago
I wouldn't say it's "damn buggy" — I use Notes daily, and have a significant number of notes that are synced between devices. In my notes I use rich formatting, embed videos, voice memos and lots of images. It handles it really well. I even use iCloud Collaboration feature on a few notes for planning, and for splitting regular expenses
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!
whatever1 · 1d ago
Markdown is the defacto language of the llms. Between this and the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown I think that markdown officially has won the markup language war.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 1d ago
Which is funny because it’s really an incomplete spec that originated from a blog post. But it won anyway because both machines and humans can use it with relative ease, which is apparently quite a difficult thing to achieve in a markup language
nextos · 1d ago
It might be my Emacs bias, but I find Org much nicer as a format. For instance, timestamps and todo items make it trivial to use Org as a planner. This would be great to have in applications such as Apple Notes.
bqmjjx0kac · 1d ago
I love org-mode, but if I were king, it would accept freakin' back-quotes for monospaced text. Instead, it takes ~tilde~ or =equals=, and I will never remember the difference no matter how many times I look it up.
Spicy69 · 1d ago
I use orgmode's ~tilde = "for code"~ and =equals_for_filenames.txt=, but what do I know.
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/
It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).
Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
fhd2 · 1d ago
I switch between Markdown and Org Mode a lot, the syntactic differences don't bother me too much, but I guess I like Markdown's a bit more. But what I really miss in Markdown:
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.
al_borland · 1d ago
I’ve seen a lot of apps extend markdown to support various additional features. Obsidian, for example, has an extensive number of community plugins which offer a ton of features.
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.
fhd2 · 1d ago
Yeah, that's my thinking with these tools. I think it needs to be more of a standard.
Either Markdown++ or Org Lite. I'll take either :) I'm not a fan of coupling formats and tools tightly.
epistasis · 1d ago
This is also the primary hangup that's kept me from adopting org-mode for notes, and I instead keep everything in MarkDown, and miss out on all the org-mode organization effects. The differences in link syntax are hard too, but I've got 5-10 years of DokuWiki in my history that make the link syntax more palatable. However, I still prefer MarkDown syntax for links too...
nextos · 1d ago
=string= leads to the text being transcribed verbatim. A good hint is to recall that the equals sign kinda implies verbatim.
kevhito · 1d ago
Ironic then that [0] (the first hit when I search "emacs org mode tutorial") says:
You can make words *bold*, /italic/, _underlined_, =code= and ~verbatim~, and, if you must, +strike-through+.
You can have all that and even more with Markdown too, but it comes with the price of "vendor lock-in", as most of those are kinda optional and depending on which markdown-app you are using. On the other side, org-mode has also kind of a vendor lock-in, as there is only one leading and format-defining app, even if there are a handful of clones implementing a subset of its features. Though, at the moment org-mode, has a slight advantage in having a more well-defined and maintained format-definition, while Markdown seems more a chaotic meltingpot of anything goes.. but it seems the community-effect manifests in the long run, and people settle on new features and their syntax. The only thing missing is a proper definition of this, which is supported by everyone. Obsidian seems to have enough weight to pull this at the moment, but we will see.
rcarmo · 1d ago
Forget it, we’ve lost. I was also partial to Textile for tables, and that’s gone nowhere too.
dingaling · 1d ago
Which is what frustrates me with the invention of Markdown.
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.
sitharus · 1d ago
Markdown was never created as a standard, it was created to fit one person's workflow and how they liked to format documents. It just so happened that it's pretty similar to how many others like to format documents.
jen729w · 1d ago
I'm sure Gruber was entirely unaware that there existed other markup languages. If only he'd done a quick Google first. Shame. /s
bn-l · 1d ago
ASCII docs is the nicest for humans of all the ones I’ve experimented with.
homebrewer · 1d ago
And it's readily convertible into high quality manpages. I thought git's were written in troff before stumbling into the actual source:
When the original is in markdown, it's somehow always noticeable.
MonkeyClub · 1d ago
> ... it’s really an incomplete spec ... . But it won anyway
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...
al_borland · 1d ago
Markdown handles complexity by allowing html to be freely put into the doc. The basics are really easy, and if you need to do something more advanced html exists. Though this can sometimes make readability drop to 0. I ended up doing this for a complex table I wanted in a readme file, and kind of regret it. I have to explain to people on my team how to use preview mode in their editor, or to view it in the repo online. Although that view online does look nice.
SOLAR_FIELDS · 19h ago
I mean it’s the same problem with mermaid but I still use that pretty religiously. Being able to have your README natively render graphs is super useful and most engineers these days have a markdown previewer built in to the software they use eg vscode
Skeime · 1d ago
RST disqualifies itself immediately by making inline markup un-nestable, though.
selcuka · 1d ago
> the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown
Thank you for pointing me to the MarkItDown library [1]. I had no idea such a thing existed.
Could that end up being the standard flavor? I’m a bit annoyed by the differences between flavors
DocTomoe · 1d ago
That's the beauty of standards ... there are so many of them.
trentnix · 1d ago
30% of what you type disappears.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
That afflicts anything you "type" on Jony Ive's "butterfly" shitboard.
Oh wait, maybe it's 30% of it is repeated...
bqmjjx0kac · 1d ago
I think over the course of 3+ years, that keyboard probably wasted at least 30 minutes of my life.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
Wow, you got off easy.
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...
threetonesun · 1d ago
HTML is. Markdown is a way of writing it that is human friendly. A notes app that can do rich-text to expressive HTML would be even better but it seems like that's not what the market is interested in.
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.
irrational · 1d ago
TIL there is a markup language war. Who are the combatants?
TheDong · 1d ago
html, markdown, reStructuredText, wikitext, AsciiDoc, emacs org mode, LaTeX, and a bunch of others.
In some contexts, JSX and markdown are also competing.
I think HTML is the true winner.
slightwinder · 1d ago
Depends on which war we are talking about. Personal writing? Professional writing? Machine-readable? For personal writing, HTML is not really participating, for the rest, mostly yes, even though for AI-tooling markdown seems the preferred language now.
Which opens the question, is there a real advantage in using Markdown with AI instead of HTML? Or did nobody ever tried this?
Diti · 1d ago
I also vote for HTML. It’s the only language I can write in which also includes all the metadata I want to include (schema.org and wikidata.org ontologies).
stingraycharles · 1d ago
RST is one.
jerkstate · 1d ago
nah, if you're talking about math, it's LaTeX
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
Except of course that almost nobody makes a READER for Markdown. WTF? It's mystifying.
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?
RandallBrown · 1d ago
> You find readme documents in Markdown in every open-source repo, but why? What are you supposed to read them with?
Every source control website I've used will render Markdown as HTML for you.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
So you need to round-trip it through a Web site? Wow, convenient.
RandallBrown · 1d ago
It's always been very convenient for me since that's where I do most of my readme reading.
The IDE that I use most of the time also renders markdown.
saagarjha · 1d ago
Why are you surprised that the easiest way to view a markup format for generating HTML is on the web?
DidYaWipe · 12h ago
I was going to call out that out as a strawman, knowing that it doesn't meet the classic definition. Let me look up what's it's called when you bury a not-agreed-with assertion in a question that requires the recipient to agree with it...
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."
kevin_thibedeau · 1d ago
Github mercifully supports README.rst.
AlotOfReading · 1d ago
Typora, obsidian, marktext, vscode and emacs with the right extensions, etc. Most people don't care enough to search them out, but you have a good number of choices available.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
Thanks, but most of those are examples of exactly what I'm talking about: an editor with a Markdown "preview" function tacked on. I just want to double-click on the .md file and read it in a rendered form. Otherwise... what's the point?
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.
AlotOfReading · 1d ago
The first 3 are exactly what you're saying. The 4th and 5th have dual panes with live updates of fully rendered markdown on the side.
DidYaWipe · 12h ago
I'm not familiar with the first two, but did try MarkText. I don't remember why, but I ended up paying for Marked. Thanks for the references; I'll check those others out.
dismalaf · 1d ago
Editors are for, gasp, writing or editing source code like Markdown. Some people write source code and aren't just users...
That's what documentation generators are for, to render all the docs and search them if you're just a user.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
And read-me files are for, <gasp>, READING. Not writing. I have no need to EDIT any Markdown files... pretty much ever. Nor do I need to clutter my IDE with tabs devoted to reference material, much less an extra pane to "preview" it in its intended rendering.
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.
dismalaf · 1d ago
Someone writes the README... And WYSIWYG? Who uses those?
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?
DidYaWipe · 12h ago
"reading READMEs is such a common task that you specifically want it in your IDE"
Are you being intentionally obtuse? I said that's exactly what I DON'T want.
dismalaf · 9h ago
So hide it from your project structure? It's an easy thing to do... I really don't get your issue, you're right.
.gitignore or .ignore file...
DidYaWipe · 5h ago
It's not part of my project. It's reference material.
TheDong · 1d ago
Markdown renders to html.
Browsers read html. You're supposed to read markdown with a browser by rendering it to html and reading the html.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
What a dumb pain in the ass. Do you seriously check out a repo, run the read-me file through a Markdown-to-HTML converter, and then launch a browser to read the result?
Kwpolska · 1d ago
GitHub renders Markdown if you click on a file in the Web repo view.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
Thanks, but when I check something out, I'm working with it on my computer. I don't want to go back to Github every time I want to read something.
al_borland · 1d ago
Many modern editors, including VS Code, have a button which opens a preview pane to see rendered Markdown. It’s a single button click (the page with the magnifying glass on it in the upper right), no one is installing pandoc to read readme files.
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.
DidYaWipe · 12h ago
Thus my point. If everyone's answer is "just read the plain text," then why have the junk in it at all?
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?
mistercheph · 1d ago
the nicest thing about markdown is that it’s entirely legible in plaintext mode, I don’t need it to be rendered, unlike other markup languages
DidYaWipe · 12h ago
But since there are vanishingly few readers that render the markup, why have it at all?
Or, from the other angle, with Markdown being found in so many places, why aren't there popular viewers for it?
jen20 · 1d ago
Part of the point of Markdown is that it's supposed to read like plain text - many of the elements is what was commonplace on usenet and in email.
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.
Thanks! But then why not just use plain text? Because of the lack of widely-available, lightweight Markdown readers, everyone just ends up reading the text with a bunch of codes in it. It's just... dumb.
epistasis · 1d ago
Markdown is plain text, so using Markdown is using plain text.
What is your alternative to Markdown here?
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
That's just playing dumb. It's only "plain text" in that it's non-binary. It contains formatting codes that aren't part of the informative content.
If everyone's just using a plain-text reader to view these files, then why clutter them up with formatting codes?
al_borland · 1d ago
Those formatting codes are informative content. They tell the reader (even in plain text) that something is a section heading, bullet, code, etc.
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?
DidYaWipe · 11h ago
If I'm in a text environment that doesn't display styled text, I use capitalization, indentation, and spacing.
epistasis · 1d ago
I'm not "playing dumb" it's basically exactly the type of text I would type in my notes before it was codified. Headers, bullets, bold, italic, all would have fit in perfectly in text-based Usenet groups of the 90s.
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?
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
Except that they aren't shown as bullets, headers, or bold unless your viewer understands the Markdown codes that invoke those decorations. Which is what I'm decrying the lack of.
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.
jonp888 · 1d ago
The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting codes intutitively make sense and are readable even without a viewer and without needing to read a specification first. People have been using asterisks as bullet points and to emphasise things long before anyone came up with Markdown.
Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.
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*.
jen20 · 3h ago
Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use _ for gentle emphasis in Markdown, which makes _even more_ sense. Be careful not to confuse specification of rendering,
As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1].
I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that the example I provided is not intuitively recognizable as a block quote. And it gets worse when you have more nested decorations.
allarm · 6h ago
">" was the quotation symbol used by email clients for decades. See mutt, elm.
For a second there I thought you were referring to a hardware solution. It would be pretty neat if I could drop straight markdown files into my Kindle and have them rendered in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.
al_borland · 1d ago
It would likely be trivial for Amazon or other ereader companies to add a feature like this.
DidYaWipe · 1d ago
I agree, but it's worse than that: There aren't even widely-available SOFTWARE readers.
meehai · 1d ago
vscode with the markdown plugin works really good.
Thanks, but that's a prime example of having to launch an editor and invoke a "preview" function (after installing a plug-in) to view this inexplicably ubiquitous format.
It's even dumber when you ponder: What is this a "preview" of? How the document will look in... a nonexistent viewer?
opan · 1d ago
After reading the comments here about the new numbering, I wonder if skipping 19 was part of the reasoning for the change. They may not want to be associated with COVID-19.
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.’
-- via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44120560
It's speculation at the moment (macrumors.com), it hasn't been officially announced yet.
But thanks for clarifying!
I only found out yesterday if that helps. Makes some kind of sense now they're on a regular yearly update cycle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history
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.
that's not going to happen
I applaud the effort simonw put into this, it works great on macOS... the platform AppleScript runs on.
Apple Notes is not intended for people who want to own their data and have control over export
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).
https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils
Which PM comes up with this? And what does a developer thing when they implement this?
Just tested and embedded images do seem to be supported?
("insert photo" -> add photo -> photo is stored as a MIME part on the note)
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.
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.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
https://zapier.com/blog/export-apple-notes/
There are ways to export, definitely not as straightforward as other tools.
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.
I try other systems and then I end up wanting the simplicity of notes.
“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%...
(Wait, I am.)
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.
Overall, I'm surprised to see markdown become mainstream so quickly.
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...
¹ well that and the iOS redesign.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/03/sdw-physicality...
Edit: I fell for the headline. This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown. So close, yet so far.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
AIUI it's only Markdown export support for now
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!
Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.
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.)
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.)
> 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!
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.
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...
https://gist.github.com/vimtaai/99f8c89e7d3d02a362117284684b...
But my guess is Apple will invent a new dialect called
iDown oder AppleDown.
;-)
Edit: The article has since been corrected.
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...
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.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/03/exclusive-ios-26-messages-car...
They are rebranding it to reflect the year, à la FIFA 26
And oh.. the obligatory:
MarkText™ - For The First Time In An Apple App
buried the lede a bit there
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!
Then I remember that some people's jobs is just to guess what Apple will do next.
https://textile-lang.com/
I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
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.
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.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102553
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.
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!
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:
It's a shame too because despite Orgmode being superior to Markdown in just about every way, its adoption is nowhere near as close (editing is hard on iOS, and needing Emacs is a barrier for the general public).Markdown isn't going away anytime soon.
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.
The official manual states equals is used for =verbatim= quotes: https://orgmode.org/manual/Emphasis-and-Monospace.html
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...
Thank you for pointing me to the MarkItDown library [1]. I had no idea such a thing existed.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
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...
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.
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?
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?
Every source control website I've used will render Markdown as HTML for you.
The IDE that I use most of the time also renders markdown.
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."
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...
Browsers read html. You're supposed to read markdown with a browser by rendering it to html and reading the html.
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?
Or, from the other angle, with Markdown being found in so many places, why aren't there popular viewers for it?
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.
[1]: https://github.com/smittytone/PreviewMarkdown
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?
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?
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*.
As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#:~:text=The%20co...
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?