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

Meta: Daring Fireball and HN “blacklist”

• Several commenters ask whether Daring Fireball links are “blacklisted” on HN; others insist there is no blacklist, just flagging and flamewar throttling.
• Some think the site’s posts simply aren’t as popular on HN as they used to be, and that inferring a blacklist from short-lived traffic is unwarranted.

What “Markdown support” in Notes might mean

• People note rumors suggest export to Markdown, not full Markdown editing or storage.
• Some argue it’s too early to critique the feature without seeing the UI/UX; it might be export-only, import/export, or WYSIWYG with Markdown shortcuts.
• Many would be happy with “export all notes as Markdown/plain text” to escape the current PDF/Pages-only options and clunky workarounds.

Markdown as format vs input method

• One camp agrees with the article: Markdown is poor as a rich-text editing substrate (parsing, malformed syntax, lossy round-trips).
• Another camp strongly defends Markdown as an excellent primary note format (e.g., Obsidian users), especially for precision, indentation, and debugging broken formatting.
• A common middle ground: Notes should stay WYSIWYG but recognize Markdown-like shortcuts (#, lists) and treat them as one-way commands.
• Several complain about opaque, buggy behaviors in rich text editors (indentation, list handling, invisible states) and prefer visible markup characters.

Standardization and “what is Markdown?”

• Long-running tension is revisited: the original spec is loose; others created CommonMark and flavors like GitHub Flavored Markdown.
• Some say a spec was absolutely necessary and that resistance to standardization left the ecosystem fragmented.
• Others argue alternative names (“Common Markdown”, “CommonMark”) were an acceptable compromise, but the whole naming fight was petty.

Apple Notes: pros, cons, and export

• Strong praise for Notes’ simplicity, fast and reliable iCloud sync, shared notes, Apple Pencil support, and deep OS integration.
• Strong complaints about: proprietary/opaque storage, poor bulk export, weird formatting bugs, sluggishness or corrupted databases for some users, and missing basics (easy date insert, strikethrough, code formatting, sane image defaults).
• Several tools and Shortcuts are shared for exporting Notes to Markdown/HTML today; some are excited that native Markdown export will make migration to other apps trivial.

Portability, vendor lock-in, and LLMs

• Many value Markdown/plain text primarily as a hedge against vendor lock-in and proprietary formats.
• Others counter that many modern formats (Office XML, HTML, AsciiDoc) are also text-based.
• Multiple commenters highlight that LLMs “natively” work well with Markdown, making Markdown export attractive for summarization and documentation workflows.

Comparisons: Obsidian, Notion, OneNote, others

• Obsidian is repeatedly cited as a model: native Markdown files on disk, good for long-term ownership and performance.
• Notion is praised for supporting Markdown as an input language while storing a different internal format.
• OneNote is criticized as a laggard: no code blocks, no Markdown shortcuts, increasingly slow at scale.
• Some mention other Markdown-centric editors (Joplin, NotePlan, etc.) and argue they’re popular precisely because their storage is plain Markdown.

Markdown’s cultural evolution

• Several note that Markdown has escaped its original “web text-to-HTML” niche and become:
  • A near-universal documentation and wiki format.
  • The de facto inline formatting language in chat tools (Reddit, Discord, Slack, Teams, etc.).
  • A “keybinding system” or shorthand for text styling, independent of whether it’s the storage format.

Note‑taking philosophy

• A side thread questions the value of elaborate note systems and “second brain” practices, describing massive note archives as digital hoarding.
• Others say lightweight notes (dates, part numbers, configs, packing lists) are undeniably useful, but do require periodic cleanup.