vijucat parent
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
The more time passes the more I care about my notes living in Markdown:
- I can transform it to other formats should I need to
- The GitHub variant of it (GFM) has feature like syntax highlighting for different languages which is incredibly useful to me based on the kinds of notes I take
- Diffing clearly genuinely is a benefit, sometimes I want to know exactly what I changed!
- I can parse it with regular expressions, so useful information doesn't end up locked in some weird binary format
- LLMs are great at reading and writing it
These things may not matter to people who are not nerds. I'm a nerd!
Indeed, Markdown has become a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts: You want to use it because the toolchain and ecosystem surrounding the format is good, and the toolchain and ecosystem are good because everyone is using it.
sir, this is HN, nobody wants to hear your rational practical ideas