Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.

There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters.

Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a line with two or more spaces then press return to create a <br>", which was designed to accommodate manually hard-wrapped text that Notes users likely don't want. Apple would have to follow something like CommonMark (feels unlikely) or implement their own Apple-flavoured Markdown, leaving you to learn what's supported and discover the quirks — kind of like its partial implementation of vim input in Xcode.

Popular Markdown apps seem to have converged on 'edit on line focus, preview on line blur', which is surely what the Notes app would do, because modal editing with preview and edit modes feels un-Appleish. 'Preview on line blur' _is_ nicer than a separate preview mode if you're a Markdown power user, but it still leaves many quirks you have to learn. (Just today I wrote, '# Thoughts on C#' in Obsidian, which reads ok with the cursor on that line until I pressed enter and the preview became, 'Thoughts on C'. Leaving me to learn I was supposed to know to write '#Thoughts on C\#' in the edit mode.)

What Apple seems to be doing with Notes—embracing Markdown syntax but not treating it as a source format—feels like a pragmatic move. It acknowledges Markdown’s familiarity without overcommitting to it as a canonical format. That distinction matters: many people like typing emphasis or `code`, but few need or want to version-control or export that exact syntax. It’s the gesture of Markdown that carries value for most users, not the fidelity to a plain-text artifact. "Even" Google Docs implemented it recently.

In my article, I argue that Markdown is increasingly a “source language” for interfaces, not documents, and this Apple Notes move seems to align with that trend. Curious how others feel about Markdown as an authoring experience vs. a content format.

Most apps do this already, to some extent. If you start a line with a - or an *, the app will convert it to a proper indented list. Heck, even Microsoft’s apps do this. I’m just asking for it to handle a few more things.

As an aside, I have a dream that Apple Notes could be piped into a website as a form of blogging. As it is, I haven't found a way to do it...

The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10% of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation that doesn't seem like it'll happen?

So often I need to go back to a note, and add some time stamped update at the end.

Am I the only one?

Yes, that's how John Gruber defines it. But like every creation you share with others, it can evolve. If popular, it will evolve. People create their own versions and uses and intentions with it.

I've used markdown for 12 years or so, for two reasons:

1. As a way to write plain text but still get visual layout cues without using a proprietary format/tool (e.g., Word).

2. Have options for later conversion to other formats/outputs (for Gruber, HTML.)

So for me, writing markdown on my Apple device means that instead of using Apple's proprietary format, I have another place to write plain text markdown and use/share it elsewhere (which I often do).

If a strict subset can have 2-way-conversion to json through yaml, then markdown can be an effective json editor for the lay person.

This will make it even easier to migrate all my Apple Notes™ to Obsidian.

Not helped by Gruber’s refusal to bless a specific well-specified Markdown flavor, leaving us to deal with all the undefined behavior of his original implementation.

I don't follow why this is a relevant concern for Apple Notes.

By any measure I would argue that Notion "has markdown support". By that I mean: You type Markdown, Notion knows how to render the markdown you type, and you can easily export files in Markdown. However, what they aren't doing, by any stretch of the imagination, is storing your documents in a markdown format on their servers or your device.

There's a third quality that you might label "Native Markdown" where the documents themselves are stored in Markdown. Obsidian does this. I'd imagine products like the Github Issues description field also does this. But I would not require this quality in a product which has "Markdown Support". In fact, I would argue this is the defining difference between saying that a product Supports Markdown versus it Is Markdown.

Its tremendously and obviously unlikely that Apple will be changing the storage format of their notes to be Native Markdown. I also don't think it really matters for a product like Apple Notes; I don't care what format the notes are stored in. Users of Obsidian might care about this, but that's because Obsidian has a different kind of customer than Apple; people who worry about data portability. Totally cool; that's just not Apple Notes.

Its like arguing that Vim keybinds are only interesting within Vim. My favorite way to use vim keybinds is this great Firefox extension; scroll down pages with j, copy the URL with yy... Markdown is more than just a data format; at a much more abstract level, its a keybinding system for text formatting. In Apple Notes today I have to hit Shift+Cmd+H to get a header. I'd much rather just hit #.

Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44183923

For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines. Just fighting the tool.

Stuff like this really makes me dislike it. I find syntax highlighting with markdown preferable than a WYSIWYG rich text editor. I get why people who don't know markdown prefer it, but the advantages diminish significantly if you know markdown.

I suspect LLMs, not users, have been the requesting this feature at Apple.

I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login. The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them.

But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey.

Given the opportunity, I would send most links wrapped in `backticks`.

This is an app called Exporter that exports your Notes to MD. Been using it for a while, to archive the state of my notes.

Why not export to the best format, LaTeX? I don’t think anyone could argue that Markdown is better than LaTeX as long as you don’t actually have to write it.

the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST that rich text editor frameworks reliably operate on takes months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into parsing and serializing markdown :/

Anyhow, we took the learnings from the Markdown editor app and created "zettel" as a result: https://github.com/opral/monorepo/tree/main/packages/zettel/.... The goal is to have an interoperable rich text AST—basically Markdown but with an AST spec.