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I migrated from mediawiki to markdown in git 8 years ago and never looked back. The ability to publish to any number of static site hosts, and use any number of editors, some that have preview mode, is rad. Data liberty, data portability, wide support, easy to convert, easy to grep, good enough for 95% of written notes.
My biggest gripe is poor support for tables of data.
Ugh tables are really the killer. If my editor doesn’t support tables then I avoid them like the plague.
What do you mainly use that supports tables?
I use obsidian. It have been pretty happy with it’s table support lately. It used to be much worse.
org-mode
I don’t use it though. I tried and forgot
That website was the fastest loading website I’ve ever visited.
I felt like I was back in the 2000s when I first got cable internet, but before ads took over everything.
That thing loaded before I even click the link.
You made me click the link out of pure skepticism. You were not exaggerating.
You’d like the mcmaster-carr website.
Static webpage generator like Hugo, probably.
It loaded quicker than this comment section on my Lemmy app
You will probably be a fan of https://kagi.com, then. I know it’s what I first noticed and what stood out to me a couple years back…
I pay for and use kagi, but it is one of the slowest websites I use, so I am not really sure what this comment is referencing? Is it fast for others?
Hm, really? Curios, because it most definitely is quite fast for me… May I ask (very approximately) what region you’re living in? Maybe they lack a data center “nearby”?
I am connected to their US-East server, with a latency often around 70. Not really sure where that datacenter is, but I am in southern Ontario, Canada. We often get put onto servers in New York or around there.
Interesting stuff, but my main takeaway is that very little of my output is worth keeping! (Who’s going to need out-of-context Star Trek shitposts in 20 years?)
I have a tendency to jump between different note-taking services. Markdown seems like it could maybe be a cure for me… By now i have no idea where I should look for a note I know I’ve taken, is it in notion, onenote, apple notes, and so on…
gotta hop on obsidian, everybody’s doin it
Obligatory Logseq vote
Idk, I would be cautious about trusting my personal notes to a proprietary piece of software…
it’s just markdown files lol
I’ve tried a few different note taking apps but I’m sticking with obsidian even though it is not open source because it saves everything in a simple folder structure as markdown files and simple images. I like that even without the program you can just search for the names of the images or notes on your system.
I use Obsidian with Zettel Notes on my phone to access and edit the MD files in Obsidian, as it is much faster for dashing off a quick note. ZN also has tools that allow you to save a web page or selection as MD which is very handy indeed.
Obsidian has the ability to save web pages/selections now with Obsidian Web Clipper
I needed it to save as markdown from my phone.
And the official Obsidian Web Clipper does just that. It saves the content to your vault as a markdown note.
As far as I can tell this is a desktop plugin. On mobile it only brings across the plain text.
Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…
Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.
haaave you heard about our lord and saviour Typst?
same layout algorithm as LaTeX, but:
- simpler markup
- sane, consistent scripting language
- fast compilation, including incremental updates so you can have a process watching your file and instantly create a new PDF on changes
- easy collaborative editing through their web app
- actually understandable error messages
Now that sounds interesting!
I wholly disagree with this after using markdown for everything for a few reasons, but it may work for some people if you really love operating from a basic CLI. Some people also get by with storing everything in plain-text files as well. Why not, plain-text will still be supported as well.
Markdown, especially CommonMark, will likely never provide what you want. Is it convenient when you have hundreds or thousands of files to manually manage? Most likely you’ll constantly be searching for ways to make markdown work more like a word processor & CMS, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management platform.
I’m not going to judge someone if they are content with basic markdown. It isn’t my place to. But to make a statement like, “if it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown” is preaching from a bubble.
The articles point was that markdown (or other similar utf-8 text based documents) is the best guarantee you have for the files being usable into the indefinite future. As you get into the complicated formats of things like word processors the less likely that format will be meaningfully usable in 10,20,50 years time, good luck reading a obsolete word processor file from the 80s today.
LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine. What didn’t last was the compact diskettes that some of them were lost to.
WordPerfect really comes from a different time. Good look reading the stuff from your iOS notes app that saves everything somewhere in the cloud and that has no export option in 10 years.
Preposterous. You need only install the iCloud client, and they (along with everything else in your iCloud drive) sync just fine.
Like I said, the files are in a standardized format. You can literally extract & view the content yourself. Do you want extensively structured data in 10, 20 or 50 years, or do you want only the most basic? If something is important enough for you to save for that long, you prob should put some effort into making it useful. I’m not saying word processors are perfect, but almost every markdown editor out there is essentially trying to recreate a word processor.
CommonMark includes like 6 levels of headings, blockquotes, code blocks, bold, italics, hyperlinks, HRs, and lists? At what cost though? Which heading is the title, which one is the subtitle? Now you want to add frontmatter, which is not part of the CommonMark spec. What if you don’t want a thousand files, will your editor support multiple pages in a single file with multiple frontmatter declarations? Now you want a table, guess you’re going to deviate to GFM. What if you want to use callouts, etc.
Things like Lexical is promising:
https://playground.lexical.dev
I’d rather have a single SQLite file that has my entire knowledgebase in a useful CMS than having a thousand markdown files that I have no clue what I titled them 10 or 20 years ago. So much easier to manage, rename things, etc.
Agree and disagree. There is a place for sophisticated management tools but when they stop getting supported or they’re purchase by a company you hate, you’re left scrambling to convert everything.
Best case for me anyway are sophisticated tools that use markdown as the basis of their files like Obsidian. So I know if they disappear I still have all my data in a universal format without any effort on my end.
The important thing is that it needs to be in a human-readable format encoded as unicode text. Beyond that, any reasonable markup (plaintext, markdown, org-mode, HTML, etc.) is fine.
WYSIWYG, Word Processors and CMSs are the kind of thing I don’t even want for my current content (or any content I made in the last 25+ years), why would I want any of them as an archive format?
Why not just use plain text then? I mean if your important content can be summarized into the most basic structure, why not just create your own markup format that makes sense to you? Makes no sense why you’d limit yourself to CommonMark.
Sure does; other people understand it too.
Your kids in 20 years trying to find your will, will love you.
Search around for “death file” - you’ll be surprised how many things people need to write down over & above their will, and the next generation might just search for exactly this
The problem with Markdown is it kind of sucks. CommonMark didn’t even defragment the markdown world, since there are numerous incompatible extensions. It seems like gfm is the best among them, or at least the most featureful.
I know there are other options like RST or AsciiDoc, but I don’t know which among them is actually “the best.”
No print it, everything digital needs a fairly complex machinery to work.
Do both and use the digital copy to print a new physical copy every x years.
Me with folders upon folders of plain .txt:
Handwritten HTML with limited tags works just as well for many purposes (just forbid div, span, and a few others and the complexity you see in most webpages evaporates). The important part is using a text-based format from which information can be extracted even if the fancier display protocols become obsolete.
Which is markdown
Not really. HTML has a formal standard and definition that covers how to properly handle most corner cases that can arise when displaying it. Markdown has no overarching formal standard and exists in multiple dialects which are not always compatible with each other.
On the gripping hand, HTML involves more keystrokes (and technically speaking you need to include a bit of boilerplate in the file for it to be proper HTML). So it depends on whether you’re willing to do a bit more typing to make sure that no one can possibly confuse your italics with boldface.
Tags interfere with human readability. Open any markdown file with a text editor in plain text and you can basically read the whole thing as it was intended to be read, with possibly the exception of tables.
There’s a time and a place for different things, but I like markdown for human readable source text. HTML might be standardized enough that you can do a lot more with it, but the source file itself generally isn’t as readable.
the sauna picture was a weird example though…
To this day, most of what I do is just in plaintext with indentation and - denoting lists. I can still read my notes from literal decades ago without issue. Markdown adds an unnecessary step for my personal notekeeping.
I like more Org Mode but I know that Markdown now is more universal. But… The best of both formatos is that I can use any plain text editor for read and editing it
AFAIK there’s no way to format an underline in markdown.
Anyone know of a workaround?
Think html renders. May not be exactly right but where I’d start
<s>There will be a few tickets available at the box office tonight.</s>
Was Is
See, this is why I’m sticking with pen and paper for the really important stuff.
No offence to the apps themselves, I find them especially useful when I need to transfer info from one device to another. But I do not trust anything purely digital for long-term to permanent archiving, especially not Cloud solutions.
Also significantly more reliable in case said info need not see the light of day. Just sayin’.
Paper is just about the easiest thing to lose over the years and it certainly doesn’t last forever. You are one bit of water damage, one fire, one break-in,… away from losing it all permanently with paper.
Same argument can be made about a hard drive, or a data tape, which is why I think we can all agree backups are vital in every type of archival action.
Backups are great for digital files yeah… Are you actually running your notes through a copier twice every time you change something important and running one of the copies to external storage?
No, I have several notebooks allocated for various types of importance - one for writing down everything, one in which I write down things which are relevant but not important long-term, and two in which I keep copies of the notes I need to keep. I just write it twice.
If you’re asking about official documents, then yes. I keep at least* two legalised copies of everything (always separate) and 5 generic photocopies of each document in case anyone needs it on file for whatever reason.
Again, these aren’t new arguments against storage environments, we’ve literally been doing bureaucracy for centuries.
Edit: to add, this is fretting over potentialities, I have lost precisely zero documents to water damage in three decades, so has my family for decades before that. Not saying it can’t happen, just saying it’s pretty easy to keep paper copies safe and usable for ridiculous amounts of time.
