9to5Mac Reports Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, You’ll Be Unsurprised to Know, I Have Thoughts

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, 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 Notes.

Apple Notes offers a great WYSIWYG rich text editing interface that works great on an iPhone and even better on a Mac, which I think is exactly appropriate. Particularly clever are the limited formatting options, where you don’t pick a font per se, but rather only from a set of predefined styles, like headings, lists, and block quote. It’s not nerdy at all. You certainly shouldn’t need to “preview” (let alone keep a separate preview view open side-by-side with your editing view), nor switch between modes for editing and viewing. That’s the Macintosh way. (But that’s why I think Apple Notes’s use of hashtags, rather than real tokenized tags like in the Finder, was an enormous mistake on Apple’s part. Real tokenized tags can contain spaces (so a multi-word tag can just be “Words Written Naturally” not “#WordsCrammedTogether”) and don’t need to be prefixed with an ugly, nerdy-looking # character. Notes using hashtags is like if the Finder disallowed spaces and uppercase letters in filenames.)

But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude — PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.

★ Wednesday, 4 June 2025