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

Summary

Marcus Mendes, in a piece at 9to5Mac with multiple spoilers for next week’s keynote: 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. Granted, this is a niche feature, but as a fierce participant in the niche, I can confirm: this is huge. When this story first started spreading this morning, it was getting repeated as Notes “gaining Markdown support”, which implied something like Bear or Obsidian, where you can type Markdown syntax characters while editing, and perhaps optionally see the Markdown syntax in your notes. “Markdown notes app” is really like a class of notes apps unto itself. Some people find this surprising, but I personally don’t want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.” Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick’s, from the documentation for Pollen: “Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML.” The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That’s not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown “everywhere”. It’s quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a “Markdown editor”, even as an option. It’s trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn’t be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple ...