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It is useful if you are used to write markdown. As well as for copying raw output from most LLMs. What I hope they also will include is the MathML/Latex support as exists in Apple iWork. Preferable in the same style as embedded in markdown as GitHub and many LLMs are doing.
 
Genuine question. (And not trolling I promise.)

Can someone explain to this muggle what’s so useful about markdown? I live in MS Office,

You can type Markdown on a keyboard. With Office, you have to point and click it with a mouse.

Also, Markdown is stored in a plain text file. and this text can be embedded in a place like code or readme files in GitHub or in Notes apps

Word documents can not be created in a terminal or embedded in non-Word documents. This last part iis thre most important, Word files can not exist outside of Word files
 
May I ask why you would want to edit that? Useful to know when a note was created.
It’s the way my brain works. I prefer to have all notes sorted in chronological order by date. I don’t view the “Created” date as the “Note Created” date, but rather the “Document Created”. Of course, if I have a simple note of text, I typically leave it as the date I created it. Also, I collect vinyl records that I catalog in EN. When I buy a record released in 1970, I want my note to reflect the release date.
 
This is the best rumor I ever heard. I hope it's true! Listen, if you ever meet Gruber you have to slip him a bill. A five, 10, a 20, even a Washington. Fame alone does not the hoagies buy!🍸😹
 
Or maybe both: a keyboard row with Markdown-related keys?
Yes, that’s along the lines of what I was thinking of. Though it wouldn’t be Markdown-related strictly speaking, just provide quicker formatting options. How about a customizable toolbar like we had in the 90s?
 
It is because markdown is the primary formatting method for LLM prompting. It is incredibly important for inference. Google Docs added export to markdown--basically any ecosystem not supporting this is locking content away from its users.

Microsoft recently updated Notepad, which has always been a text-only, no-formatting app, to support Markdown formatting. Your logic makes sense. Prompting support. ::shivers::
 
Notes has the potential to be the most common RAG AI in the world. This might be the first step.

You ask Notes (or Siri, sigh) a question, it answers you, using your notes as the source.
 
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Genuine question. (And not trolling I promise.)

Can someone explain to this muggle what’s so useful about markdown? I live in MS Office, so I tend to find markdown annoying rather than useful. In fact, I use ChatGPT to convert markdown to rich text when I come across it.
Markdown is mostly useful for people who work with plain text. It’s a way to define basic semantic structure like headers, bullets and so forth in a text document without getting involved in actually styling it. If you’re working mainly in MS Word, it would have little to no benefit for you.
 
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You can type Markdown on a keyboard. With Office, you have to point and click it with a mouse.

Also, Markdown is stored in a plain text file. and this text can be embedded in a place like code or readme files in GitHub or in Notes apps

Word documents can not be created in a terminal or embedded in non-Word documents. This last part iis thre most important, Word files can not exist outside of Word files

Hey don’t forget about “templating”, with markdown the output can have many different styles, there are lot flexibility. Markdown works like “semantics”.

Lots benefits using markdown.
 
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Apple's Notes app is rumored to be getting limited Markdown support in iOS 26 and macOS 26, according to 9to5Mac. The feature would allow users to export text in the markdown format.

iOS-26-Mock-Rainbow-Feature.jpg

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that some writers prefer to use over rich text. Rather than using HTML for bold, italics, links, and headers, Markdown uses quick character shortcuts like **bold** or #header. It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly.

If the rumor holds up, it's likely to be unveiled at next week's Worldwide Developers Conference alongside other iOS 26 improvements, including automatic translation and polls in Messages, not to mention a major visual redesign.

Article Link: Apple Notes Expected to Gain Support for Exporting in Markdown in iOS 26

Ever try to manually select text from chatgpt.com and paste it into Pages? Nothing gets pasted. Paste it into Notes and it does get pasted in plain text, which is fine. Seems the markdown in output of chatgpt.com (and other places) is not understood by Pages which cannot use the text version and it silently fails. I don't know what this change to Notes will effect but my observation is that if it will understand markdown then plain text paste from a markdown source will now fail.
 
Genuine question. (And not trolling I promise.)

Can someone explain to this muggle what’s so useful about markdown? I live in MS Office, so I tend to find markdown annoying rather than useful. In fact, I use ChatGPT to convert markdown to rich text when I come across it.

TBL described it best:


Berners-Lee originally expressed his vision of the Semantic Web in 1999 as follows:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A "Semantic Web", which makes this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.[9]

Pure text is the most-basic medium of shared digital information. Markup is meta-semantic text; a tokenised, embedded means to accentuate, and highlight (basic) content.

Take my discussion this morning on how to form a meta-epistemological analysis of C. Dweck's work "mindset: the new psychology of success":

As I was alluding-to in our previous conversation about C. Dweck's 'mindset' polarisation: the dichotomy between Descarte's persuasio (Conviction) and scientia (Knowledge) lends-well to the idea (for ex.: a-document-i-can-not-read.docx) that the interplay between the two is subjectively oppositional (and functionally inverse) in this context. If we layer K. Popper's "Third World" as a meta-analysis atop this (see: some-esoteric-text.docx), we can therefore derive the idea that only our meta-meta Executive can lay-claim to detailed (and complete) understanding of just what it means to be placed into a 'fixed', or a 'growth' mindset.

WTF!! What if I have no viable means to decipher and integrate the whatsit.docx additions to the conversation?

Ultimately, I am lost: I am unable to contribute-back to the conversation.

*.md *still* requires a parsing agent, but this also holds-true for simple ASCII text . . . make-no-bones: as far as parsers go, it's much more simple to parse the details of said objective contents of thought by any individual who so may wish to decode/encode such, than content which has been encoded by a Coven of individuals who claim exclusivity to the Idea (an Idea that they choose to keep locked behind doors only "members" who hold a 'Key' may unlock).

Don't get me wrong: there are aspects of .md which I do not find particularly agreeable. Yet, I can slice&dice&cook my Content on any computer; in any OS; with any tool.

This cannot be said for the .docx files with which I am required to regularly interact 🤷‍♂️
 
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The fact Apple turned their nose up at John Gruber by not accepting his invite for The Talk Show and now they’re shipping markdown (which he invented) to 4 billion people.
Using asterisks, lines and # signs to indicate formatting rules has existed in word processors since the 1980's. This was not an invention but a classic something old is new again.
 
I enjoy Bear, but this will be great. I take a lot of notes on the iPad and Mac for work and when I'm working on D&D stuff. So, it will be nice to remove one subscription I have and use iCloud to keep everything in sync.
 
This is weird, because typing Markdown isn't exactly convenient on the standard iOS keyboard. Maybe improve the keyboard/UI instead?
The ideal way to write it on iOS is with an app that supports it properly, like Obsidian, iA Writer, Drafts (and the dearly departed Apollo Reddit client), where you write in plaintext with a few buttons above the keyboard like (B), (I), (#), etc. that will add the formatting for you (e.g. (B) will add ** to either end of the current selection, or if no select, it'll add ****, with the cursor between the two middle stars), while also showing the marked up text properly as bold, italics, etc (they'll look like **bold**, _italics_, etc. in your text).

This makes it easy to see what the text really is, while also giving a strong indication of what it will look like when rendered as rich text.

And writing in Markdown on iOS is way, way, easier than writing HTML on iOS, even without the editor helping (I've written a ton of Markdown text on iOS on standard iOS keyboards over the years, in the Reddit app and elsewhere - I prefer Drafts or Obsidian, but being able to write without switching apps is better, except for lengthy documents).
 
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Can someone explain to this muggle what’s so useful about markdown?
With Rich Text, you can never really be certain what text (and formatting) is actually there, only how it's presented. With Markdown, you can see and control every single character. I much prefer writing in Markdown, given the choice, and then I can render it as Rich Text or HTML or PDF or whatever, as needed, if necessary.

It has become popular in mostly-text discussion systems like Reddit, along with GitHub and other developer-related systems, mostly as a way of storing documentation, because, since it's all done as plain text, it works really well for text-based version control systems.

Plain text is universally compatible to everywhere, and Markdown-formatted text can be read with ease by humans - it was originally invented to mimic the markup people were using informally for emphasis in text-based communication going back well before the Internet was widely available and before HTML was a thing - millions of conversations on Usenet News and similar systems. People got in the habit of using emoticons, like :-) and punctuation to fill in for missing markup - like *bold* and _italics_, to convey more than plain text in otherwise plain text conversations. Markdown just took advantage of the emphasis conventions people were already using, and simply added a way to render that into HTML (and then later all sorts of other formats like Rich Text).
 
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In fact, having multiple apps that can read and edit markdown files is a bonus because then you can point multiple apps to the same files and edit them easily from a range of apps. I want to see Apple open up Notes so it's not a black box that my stuff gets locked away in. Let me access my notes from other apps.
This is the main reason I don't actively use the Notes app - it's everywhere, and it syncs nicely, and it supports some nice formatting and integrations with other Apple apps, but to a large extent it can only do what Apple decides to take the time to make it do.

With Obsidian (my Markdown tool of choice), I have an enormous amount of control over how it does things (there's a whole community plugin system), and I can easily get access to all the data on macOS, as a directory tree full of Markdown-formatted files - I can even edit the files directly with MacVim, and Obsidian will see the changes and immediately sync them to my iPhone and iPad (and vice versa). And from MacVim I have access to any command or script I want to write to process the files and text in a wide variety of ways.
 
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