If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
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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..
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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
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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, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management database.
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.
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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..
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.
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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'.
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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
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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, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management database.
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 to be read today.
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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..
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.
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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, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management database.
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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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 two "official" copies of everything (always separate,) and 5 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.
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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.
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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, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management database.
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.
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.
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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.
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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 to be read today.
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.
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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.
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Obsidian has the ability to save web pages/selections now with Obsidian Web Clipper
I needed it to save as markdown from my phone.
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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 to be read today.
LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine
