HACKER Q&A
📣 LivingGlitcher

Using Markdown Files for Notetaking?


I've used Roam Research, Google Docs, etc. All of them haven't scratched my itch for offline and synced notes.

I've been using markdown notes for a short while, but some shortcomings, such as a lack of collapsible points and styling, make me want to (re)consider other notetaking solutions.


  👤 themodelplumber Accepted Answer ✓
I wonder if an extensible editor (example: Atom) could do both of those things with Markdown files. Assuming by styling you mean things like being able to highlight and custom-style some text, even in a typically text-only view of a markdown file. It wouldn't be a big surprise if that could be done...somehow. Collapsible points ought to be doable for sure.

Personally I use other methods for styling within markdown, for example emoji, tags, link formatting with brackets (for things that are not really links), etc.

I also take any list that's longer than 8-10 items and break it up by category or reorganize it so it's less visually overwhelming.

Otherwise you may find it helpful to look into more rich-editor-style notetaking solutions like cherrytree or Notecase Pro. The latter is proprietary but I used it for years and was very happy with it. Good luck in your search.

https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

https://www.notecasepro.com/


👤 runjake
Somebody’s going to com in here and mention Obsidian Notes, so it might as well be me: https://obsidian.md

It supports collapsible sections just with the Markdown syntax but it’s also highly-extensible in any way you wish. I think Bear and other editors support Markdown collapsible a as well.


👤 dschuessler
Concerning collapsible points and styling: You can use inline HTML at every point in Markdown. So you can use
tags for the former and