Can you talk to me about Markdown? The pros and cons

workflow
#1

Hi there,

A noobie to the boards here looking at Agenda vs the likes of Bear. One of the big differences is that Bear is pretty much exclusively Markdown editor vs Agenda which offers limited Markdown support.

As someone who is new to the whole idea of Markdown anyway, I’m not necessarily wedded to either approach. So I wanted to just get some some thoughts from the people here around the pros and cons of using Markdown exclusively. What advantages does Agenda offer vs a fully focused Markdown app?

Thanks,

#2

Ummm… Sometimes others are not that knowledgeable about markdown. So it’s also good to have a traditional editor with markdown support for those who got used to it. I think Agenda’s approach caters to wider users. Just my idea.

#3

I think we are in similar shoes.

If you use markdown regularly, or come from other apps where you extensively use markdown for formatting - I can see why you’d want it in a notes app.

For me, I don’t need that on my notes application, and as I don’t use it enough, find myself having to remind myself every time what the short cuts are for markdown.

If you do big, long form notes - Perhaps markdown would be useful.

But it’s touted as some kind of “gold standard” amongst the online written word, and I just don’t see it myself.

#4

Indeed this is the balance we tried to find. Agenda is not a markdown editor, the internal format we use is not simple markdown text. We support more advanced features than you can build with pure markdown, and expect to add many more. We also feel that exposing raw markdown can be off-putting to a lot of people that might not be familiar with it. As such we wanted a more classic text editor that shows bold as bold and italic as italic without necessarily showing asterixes and underscores for example, and clickable links without needing to be enclosed in square brackets etc.

Having said all that, we do support using markdown syntax as shortcuts to easily format text and insert checklist items etc, as described in this topic: