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Apple Notes Expected to Gain Markdown Support in iOS 26
- marbletiles 1y ago> Instead of tapping buttons to bold text or create headers, users could type *bold* or # Header directly into their notes. Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too. Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that is great, so long as I don't have to ever see, use or be aware of it.
- divbzero 1y agoApple Notes is used not only with onscreen keyboards in iOS, but also with physical keyboards in iPadOS and macOS, where familiarity with Markdown input could make it faster than shortcut commands.
- BrandonSmith 1y agoI tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win. It is possible reporting is getting this wrong and the Markdown feature and it is just to serve use case above. As an example, Google Docs recently enabled "Paste from Markdown" that also is a huge convenience.
- geerlingguy 1y agoYeah, this would be huge for me; I often toss a bunch of notes into an Apple Notepad note just to have it in my pocket, and everything I write with a keyboard is markdown. This just makes it so I don't have to stare at a bunch of random characters and can have actual formatting. A win in my book!
- candiddevmike 1y ago> I tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win. AIUI it's only Markdown export support for now
- markbao 1y agoI think it’s user preference. For me it’s easier to get to the punctuation asterisk (basically muscle memory and <0.5s) than to tap the formatting menu, wait for the keyboard sheet to go down and the formatting sheet to go up, tap Bold, then tap the X and wait for animations to complete again (which I have no muscle memory for and need to look at every UI element that I’m tapping).
- derefr 1y agoBut formatting already-typed text on iOS is incredibly fiddly (as you have to select a text span first, and iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this — especially if the span starts or stops at something iOS doesn't consider a "whole token.") Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.
- ninkendo 1y agoI was just typing a reply to gush about how much I agree with you and how awful iOS text editing is (I’m on my iPhone at the moment) and decided to play with editing text to get some example complaints, when I had an epiphany: iOS lets you double tap to start a text selection now. I don’t know when this started. I’m 99% sure I used to long-press to start a text selection, and that it would start highlighting the word under the little preview bubble. My muscle memory is still to do this when I want to highlight text; it just never works and I always get frustrated. Maybe if I start remembering to double tap to highlight text, the text editing experience might actually start to be passable? :shrug: (Yes, I know about long pressing the keyboard to use it as a trackpad. I do that most of the time, but it’s still fiddly, it very very often misinterprets a tap and starts text selection wildly off from where I wanted it to, and the only fix is to tap around in the text area.)
- eviks 1y agoHow can you be 99% sure when long press in *edited text* like when writing notes doesn't select, but instead moves the caret with a magnifying glass?
- ninkendo 1y agoI said I was 99% sure it used to work that way. But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari. That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not. So it’s not that they changed something, it’s that the behavior is different for editable vs noneditable text, and my brain keeps doing the wrong one. Maybe now that I know about double tapping my brain can finally have a complete picture of the behavior split and I can stop fucking it up each time. (Although I’m still pretty certain that doing a brief long press, but not long enough for the magnifying glass to show up, used to select a word of text. I can’t prove this though. Maybe I’m remembering the Force Touch days when you used to be able to do a Force Touch while long pressing to expand selection. That would make sense with the timeline.)
- eviks 1y agoCurrent - Tap Aa - Tap Italic - Tap close - Type - Tap Aa - Tap Italic (to reset) - Tap close Future - Hold a key to insert asterisk - Type - Hold a key to insert asterisk
- ale42 1y agoI first thought it was some kind of extrapolation like... at the rate features are currently being added, Markdown will land in ~2032 with iOS 26... just noticed about the new version numbering, I missed that news!
- jaoane 1y agoIt sounded to me like a joke, as in “markdown will be supported on February 30th”. Then I read the article text, which seemed serious, and I was confused.
- ale42 1y agoExactly this.
- krackers 1y agoThey must be doing version numbers based on marketing. From OS X, to macOS 11...15, and now macOS 26.
- plufz 1y agoI think the version number from year is quite good. I keep forgetting which version is new and old with the current system. Now it will be easy to remember if you are lagging behind one year, or two or whatever.
- lurk2 1y agoI would not recommend investing in the iOS Notes ecosystem. There is no way to export these notes with their metadata and media intact without using iCloud. If you need a note-taking app, go with Joplin instead; it supports Markdown, has both iOS and desktop clients, and supports self-hosted syncing.
- Gigachad 1y agoI just use it like I would a physical notepad. Throwaway notes, shopping lists, measurements, etc.
- divbzero 1y agoYou can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.
- lurk2 1y agoInteresting. Did they add this feature recently? How do you set it up? Embedded files (photos, video, audio, PDFs, etc.) and bullet hierarchies were the two things that I remember being the most trouble; you can copy bullet hierarchies from iOS Notes and paste them into another app, but they aren’t detected when copying the note via Shortcuts. Embedded files had to be manually saved. I think you could Airdrop notes to a MacOS device, but it would wipe the date created metadata from what I remember.
- lblume 1y agoNo, in fact it is available since iOS 4 (2010). You just connect the account and turn on the notes synchronisation (right below calendar synchronisation).
- dunham 1y agoI wrote python code to extract the notes years ago[1], but it's bit-rotted, so it no longer supports tables, raw stroke data, or the newer features like equations. Maybe I'll update it someday, but I'm not using notes at the moment and have too many other things going one. https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils
- nkmnz 1y agoproper access to pdfs already stored in notes would be good, too.
- howmayiannoyyou 1y agoNotes: I'm stuck with this and wish I could leave, but the combo of security and attachments leaves me with few options. Notes is buggy, lacks interoperability, has crap AI integration, etc. BUT... the real pain is Apple Messages. The inability create folders, rules, etc. is insanity. At a time when most comms are instant why would you not offer users the same level of organization they enjoy with email, or with other IM platforms?
- zamadatix 1y agoThe MacRumors article claims Markdown input formatting but they source this from a 9to5Mac article which only seems to claim Markdown exporting. Edit: The article has since been corrected.
- neepi 1y agoMarkdown export would be appreciated. My number one concern with Notes is that it is 100% opaque file formats (weird serialisation inside SQLite and no api). Backup to markdown would be great.
- codezero 1y agoI pinged one of the editors and they updated the article, thanks for calling this out.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- briandoll 1y agoI've been all-in on Bear for iOS and MacOS and have never once missed Apple Notes functionality
- dmd 1y agoBear's support of embedded things like pictures and especially PDFs is atrocious compared to Notes, unfortunately.
- tlhunter 1y agoMicrosoft notepad is also getting markdown support. It's a very interesting coincidence! Overall, I'm surprised to see markdown become mainstream so quickly. https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-formatting-in-notepad-begin-rolling-out-to-windows-insiders/ https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...
- ttoinou 1y agoIt took “only” 20 years
- dmkolobov 1y agoQuite honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. It’s been 21 years since one of their biggest evangelists wrote the format!
- LordDragonfang 1y agoIt's not a coincidence at all. Markdown is the "native" language for most LLMs, and the hype around it requires even low-level tools to support it (for both legitimate and marketing reasons)
- rk06 1y agoI wish they stopped adding feature to notepad. Or if they really wanted to, create a new app note.exe and add features to it instead.
- 90s_dev 1y ago
- dadrock 1y agoInteresting, considering MS just announced the same exact feature in the new Notepad app on Windows 11 last week.
- cyberge99 1y agoI switched from Evernote to Upnote and now that I have X-url-callbacks and I can link into notes, I’ve found my note utopia.
- puttycat 1y agoIn case anyone else had no idea where the 26 came from: https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/03/exclusive-ios-26-messages-carplay-more/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/03/exclusive-ios-26-messages-car...
- tacker2000 1y agoThis link has the actual info: https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/28/ios-26-coming-next-month/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/28/ios-26-coming-next-month/ They are rebranding it to reflect the year, à la FIFA 26
- mdeeks 1y agoI really hope Apple Notes makes this something that's opt-in and I don't have to see. Thankfully it sounds like it is an export only feature. I think there is a bifurcation of people who like markdown and people who like rich text. And both groups have strong opinions. Apple Notes was my goto rich text editor. Fingers crossed that they aren't making this worse for us. Related: I switched away from Bear notes because personally I find markdown hideous to look at. This post made me go back and check on it today and it looks like Bear notes now supports hiding markdown right after you type it. This seems like a really good compromise, though I still don't like that I see it when I place my cursor on it. Worth a shot if you're a "never markdown" person like me.
- candiddevmike 1y agoYou hate reading unrendered markdown? I've looked at markdown so much that my brain renders it in my head.
- mdeeks 1y agoURL are particularly egregious. In rich text it is just a word with a blue highlight or underline. In markdown my sentence with a [link](https://myfavorite.site.com/article/blah/whatever/something.html https://myfavorite.site.com/article/blah/whatever/something....) looks like this.
- jen20 1y agoOr, preferably, a [link][1]. [1]: https://whatever.com https://whatever.com
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoBear’s implementation is great. One thing I hate about rich text is that it's basically impossible to not inherit the formatting of adjacent text if you move your cursor around, nor is it possible to see the current formatting state. If your cursor is between whitespace and an italic word, will inserted text be normal or italic? Markdown’s formatting characters solve this by creating a boundary that the cursor can be on either side of.
- DevKoala 1y agoI would have killed for this back in 2022. I take all of my notes on ChatGPT now, and for more structured data I have built specialized tools/agents, and even small front ends like for my portfolio management track. It’s crazy how different my world used to be back then; note apps feel so primitive now.
- kupopuffs 1y agoI'm sorry, are you saying that you sent all your notes to ChatGPT as prompts? How do you recall or get your notes back?
- DevKoala 1y agoFor example I have a thread for engineer status updates. I get the call transcripts from an internal app my company developed and I push everything into ChatGPT. When I need to recall something, I just ask ChatGPT. It is much better than indexed search. If I need to just write and don’t want feedback, i tell ChatGPT to not reply until I say so, and I will just write in the most lazy and disparaged way, a true brain dump, When I am ready, ChatGPT will sort out my thoughts. If conversations get too large I summarize everything that’s important and migrate to another conversation.
- edgarvaldes 1y agoThis is the most alien (to me) workflow that I have ever read in HN. And that includes emacs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dmd 1y ago> I take all of my notes on ChatGPT now I can't even imagine what this even means.
- skinnymuch 1y agoI’m also interested in what you mean of how you get your notes back. Sounds interesting.
- xyst 1y agoApple really hates any major versions with 9
- andy_xor_andrew 1y agoI'm suspecting this is because future Apple Intelligence features (when they actually get released) will allow LLMs to write notes, and of course we all know markdown is well understood by LLMs.
- htk 1y agoI hope they also fix the cursor jumping bug when typing on tables. The bug's been there for years.
- xer0x 1y agoHalf expected to see this on Daring fireball
- s1mon 1y agohttps://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-markdown https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-mar...
- afavour 1y agoKind of amazed that this was the way I found out about Apple’s new OS versioning system
- solardev 1y agoYou mean you don't bump your semver by 8 major versions when you add markdown exports?
- zombot 1y agoNot semver any more, it's year numbers now.
- yborg 1y agoThey haven't officially announced it.
- nozzlegear 1y agoAs another commenter said, they haven't officially announced it yet. That said, it's all I've heard about in the Apple world for the last couple of days¹, so it may just be that you don't follow Apple news closely. ¹ well that and the iOS redesign.
- zombot 1y agoThere is an iOS redesign?
- nozzlegear 1y agoYeah, also just an unconfirmed rumor until next week, but supposedly it's going to be "glassy." https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/03/sdw-physicality-new-age https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/03/sdw-physicality...
- promiseofbeans 1y agoI thought the title was an Onion-esque joke at first, not realising they've changed the naming scheme
- rootsudo 1y agoMe too, me too.
- qingcharles 1y agoI thought it was just a typo, but I assume they've switched to years? Please tell me this won't end up like the Xbox naming scheme.
- yapyap 1y agoiOS 18 to 26, genius
- RollingRo11 1y ago> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly That's a shame. I was hoping for at least the option to edit in markdown (and praying for LaTeX support too)
- meindnoch 1y ago>and praying for LaTeX support too This gave me the belly laugh I needed, thanks!
- RollingRo11 1y agoa guy can (c/h)ope
- paxys 1y agoHappy to get markdown support but I really hope the Notes app stays basic and away from LLM drivel.
- opan 1y agoAfter reading the comments here about the new numbering, I wonder if skipping 19 was part of the reasoning for the change. They may not want to be associated with COVID-19.
- whatever1 1y agoMarkdown is the defacto language of the llms. Between this and the python library from Microsoft that converts all of their formats to markdown I think that markdown officially has won the markup language war.
- jerkstate 1y agonah, if you're talking about math, it's LaTeX
- irrational 1y agoTIL there is a markup language war. Who are the combatants?
- stingraycharles 1y agoRST is one.
- TheDong 1y agohtml, markdown, reStructuredText, wikitext, AsciiDoc, emacs org mode, LaTeX, and a bunch of others. In some contexts, JSX and markdown are also competing. I think HTML is the true winner.
- Diti 1y agoI also vote for HTML. It’s the only language I can write in which also includes all the metadata I want to include (schema.org and wikidata.org ontologies).
- Diti 1y agoI’m very curious about why I’ve been downvoted. I assumed the HN crowd was tech-savvy enough to know what ontologies are? And one can’t write a blog post in Turtle.
- slightwinder 1y agoDepends on which war we are talking about. Personal writing? Professional writing? Machine-readable? For personal writing, HTML is not really participating, for the rest, mostly yes, even though for AI-tooling markdown seems the preferred language now. Which opens the question, is there a real advantage in using Markdown with AI instead of HTML? Or did nobody ever tried this?
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoHere we are 20+ years later..... Imagining an alternate universe where it could have been Textile. https://textile-lang.com/ https://textile-lang.com/
- keyboardJones 1y agoI made a feature request for this very thing within the latest version cycle. I imagine others have as well. Maybe they listened, maybe they didn’t, but here’s hoping! Edit: I fell for the headline. This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown. So close, yet so far.
- lxgr 1y ago> This is only to export in markdown, not directly write in markdown. Oof, I got really excited about this for half a day or so... Maybe worth changing the headline?
- jonhohle 1y agoI should probably go back to Notational Velocity, but am spoiled by iCloud. It’s effectively the perfect scratch pad notes app. Markdown for all content, search is also document creation, great key bindings, sorting by all relevant fields, and fast.
- al_borland 1y agoI was just thinking about Notational Velocity last week. I went and looked and it seems the latest release is from 2011. It mentions it’s a universal binary, but considering it mentions support for OS X 10.4 - 10.7, I have a feeling it is PPC/Intel universal, not Intel/ARM. I see the GitHub has some more recent updates, but still 5 years old.
- al_borland 1y agoApple Shortcuts already has a Rich Text to Markdown converter out of the box. It was already a quick jump to Markdown using only built-in Apple tools, but maybe this will be a cleaner export. I’ve been converting from Apple Notes to Obsidian and it’s been pretty painful. Everything is just slightly off, in inconsistent ways, where I need to clean up every note manually. I’m deep enough into it that adding the feature now won’t do me much good, but might be helpful if I want to use notes for quick capture and then maybe export to Obsidian if I want to save it.
- faizmokh 1y agoI would ditch Obsidian in a heartbeat once there's a Markdown support in Apple Notes.
- 90s_dev 1y agoSometimes I wonder if there's a place for me in the software economy. Then I remember that some people's jobs is just to guess what Apple will do next.
- debuggerson 1y agoThis might be the stepping stone toward AI integration, as I believe every phone will soon come with an AI agent that helps execute multiple tasks and manage files internally. Just like Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior VP of services mentioned, the future of phones will look very different from what we know now. I expect it has more function like converting to other formats.
- BenFranklin100 1y agoMicrosoft needs to get to work pronto and add native Markdown support to OneNote.
- wltr 1y agoOkay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19? I assume, they’ll start following a year of release both for macOS and iOS, so it would be easier to know for non-techies. But my first reaction was ‘em, 8 years into the future? Looks weird, isn’t it? Maybe that’s some kind of a joke.’
- zimpenfish 1y ago> Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19? I only found out yesterday if that helps. Makes some kind of sense now they're on a regular yearly update cycle.
- piperswe 1y agoHaven't they been on a yearly update cycle since the start?
- zimpenfish 1y agoAccording to [0], "pretty much", yeah. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history
- AdamN 1y agoIt will continue to be yearly but now all the OS numbers will be the same (the most important part) and require little inside knowledge to know if it's new or old (only a geek would know that iOS 15 was released in 2024 for instance, the new method will be more like car model years).
- wodenokoto 1y agoI also thought the article would be a joke about an obvious feature never arriving.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>Okay, am I the only one who didn’t know that (apparently) the next iOS version is going to be 26, not 19? It's speculation at the moment (macrumors.com), it hasn't been officially announced yet.
- eviks 1y agoInstead of going primitive with md would be better to have the rich format more open and widely supported
- pvo50555 1y agoI am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times? I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoShift+Option+Command V pastes plain text on macOS.
- quitit 1y agoGripes about missing features which are neither missing nor undocumented is on brand for HN. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102553 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102553
- __jonas 1y agoI find that combination very annoying to press personally. It's possible to change the hotkey by going to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts ... > App Shortcuts, and then under 'All Applications' adding a shortcut for the menu title 'Paste and Match Style' (I suppose it would be different if the OS language is not set to English). I agree with the person you are responding to though, I would really prefer if 'match style' was the default OS-wide, and there was an option to preserve formatting with a hotkey instead.
- singularity2001 1y agoplease send me your paypal, hero of the day
- basisword 1y agoI wonder if younger people are aware of keyboard shortcuts? Growing up using primarily phones and tablets it might be less of a thing. I saw a TikTok recently explaining copy/paste shortcuts like it was a hack and people were amazed in the comments.
- rcarmo 1y agoJust for export, apparently, so… kind of pointless given the amount of amazing Markdown note taking apps on iOS.
- crossroadsguy 1y agoI just want to know what are some better iOS keyboards that don't send home everything I type. Because I am pretty sure that shit is not improving. And oh.. the obligatory: MarkText™ - For The First Time In An Apple App
- trumbitta2 1y agoWhat I find outrageous is that it's export-only. No writing in Markdown.
- singularity2001 1y agoso very useless
- singularity2001 1y agoany conflict with #tags?
- xenodium 1y agoI have lots of happy users who moved from Notes to my app Journelly (feels like tweeting but for your eyes only) https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-eyes-only https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey... It’s powered by org plain text, but Markdown is coming too. Edit: you don’t need to know org markup today to use Journelly. It’s an implementation detail. Here’s a happy user https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for-those-who-dont-do-org https://ellanew.com/ptpl/157-2025-05-19-journelly-is-org-for...
- mococa 1y agoBear app is so damn good at markdown (by default) https://bear.app https://bear.app
- bschne 1y ago> It sounds like the feature will only add support for exporting text with markdown formatting and not writing in markdown directly buried the lede a bit there
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- devinprater 1y agoThis will be pretty nice for accessibility too. Hopefully this leads to Markdown everywhere in the OS, and that follower-OS' add it too. For accessibility, it's great because I can have my screen reader announce punctuation, so it reads star star this star star, instead of no indication of italics at all. Granted, that could always be made better, using speech parameters like pitch and speed to indicate formatting, but that's not found a good home outside of Emacspeak.
- amai 1y agoWhich of the many dialects of Markdown will it support? https://gist.github.com/vimtaai/99f8c89e7d3d02a362117284684baa0f https://gist.github.com/vimtaai/99f8c89e7d3d02a362117284684b... But my guess is Apple will invent a new dialect called iDown oder AppleDown. ;-)