this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] pebbles 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Ugh tables are really the killer. If my editor doesn't support tables then I avoid them like the plague.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What do you mainly use that supports tables?

[–] pebbles 5 points 1 week ago

I use obsidian. It have been pretty happy with it's table support lately. It used to be much worse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

org-mode

I don't use it though. I tried and forgot

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (7 children)

That website was the fastest loading website I’ve ever visited.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 10 points 1 week ago

I felt like I was back in the 2000s when I first got cable internet, but before ads took over everything.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

That thing loaded before I even click the link.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

You made me click the link out of pure skepticism. You were not exaggerating.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

You'd like the mcmaster-carr website.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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”?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Static webpage generator like Hugo, probably.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

It loaded quicker than this comment section on my Lemmy app

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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?)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Now that sounds interesting!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine. What didn't last was the compact diskettes that some of them were lost to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] taladar 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

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."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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..

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

gotta hop on obsidian, everybody's doin it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Obligatory Logseq vote

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] brrt 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Obsidian has the ability to save web pages/selections now with Obsidian Web Clipper

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I needed it to save as markdown from my phone.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No print it, everything digital needs a fairly complex machinery to work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Do both and use the digital copy to print a new physical copy every x years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Me with folders upon folders of plain .txt:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

the sauna picture was a weird example though...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

AFAIK there's no way to format an underline in markdown.

Anyone know of a workaround?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Think html renders. May not be exactly right but where I'd start

There will be a few tickets available at the box office tonight.

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