Trilium is actually the reverse interestingly, it uses as WYSIWYG editor as its primary - not sure exactly what format it stores them as internally.
I would say that Markdown is definitely entering the mainstream (albeit slowly) with chat apps like Whatsapp, Discord, MS Teams supporting elements of it, social media websites like Reddit as well as forums like Discourse using it as a replacement for the old BBCode type comments and some companies are now using it more for internal documentation.
I had totally the inverse experience of yours, I had barely ever used Markdown (outside of Reddit comments) and I've entirely fallen in love with it. The ability to write without having to fight with the formatting, the ability to edit entire formats either just by replacing the actual formatting tags in the document (for example I changed all my **bold** headers from my imported evernote notes to ## h2 lines just by doing a simple find & replace) or just changing the CSS for the output format leaving my actual notes intact.
I think the fact that most of the more popular non-proprietary note apps are supporting Markdown as their primary language is a decent testament to how good it is.
It requires a bit of a re-think after years of word processors but I really hope it becomes the norm in more places.
Joplin is saving the markdown notes in files with filenames that don't relate to the names of the notes. Such as "ff95fb34fefe44a6bc3f7d0d8d0f1530.md". So if I needed to edit them outside of Joplin I have no structure it seems. This hierarchy is needed to find the notes. Is there a way round this? Is the structure part of markdown? Or something from Joplin?
Joplin doesn't save its notes as Markdown files at all. They are all stored within the database - the hashed name means that you can have multiple notes with the same name plus a bunch of other sync related magic.
I strongly suspect the notes you are talking about is the sync target database which you really don't want to start messing with if you don't want to break your sync target. They are essentially metadata, not a perfect representation of the notes.
Right, thanks. No I'll not touch it. I guess I'd need to "Export" the notes to a format of my choice? Which I'm used to with rich text notes. Sort of negating any benefit of having them as markdown.
Yes you would need to export but no it does not negate it being in Markdown as there is no conversion process which could cause your data to potentially get altered. You can edit notes outside of Joplin by using pretty much any external editor you want (https://joplinapp.org/help/#external-text-editor)
Perhaps some did, but I most definitely did NOT. I hated markdown. I still don't like everything about it. I just put up with it because Joplin uses it (not the other way around) and because, as Daeraxa and others pointed out, it IS widely used and accepted, as well as future proof.
So I get that you are passionately against it (I was too), but in that case I have a feeling that either 1) Joplin is not for you, period, or 2) you learn to live with it and perhaps even like it.
I'm rooting for you that there will be an option 3) Joplin will further implement, vastly improve and fully support its own rich text editor on all platforms but I'm not holding out too much hope in that regard
Apologies for the double post and quoting you twice in a row, @ianp5a but I'm enjoying the discussion I find what you're saying interesting
However, I actually vehemently disagree with your statement above.
I am an old buzzard(ess) by now (computer wise) and have lived through a lot of word processing applications. I don't remember them all but from the days of WordPerfect 5.1, I have seen more editors come and go than I can count. In many cases once they were obsolete and you needed to extract some text from it, forget it... it was some proprietary format and all you saw was a huge list of symbols. If you were lucky enough you could find some emulator that could read it, but in most cases, your text was gone forever.
So again I get what you're saying, but I am VERY interested in how my text is stored under the hood. I learned as early as the 90s to only store text in future proof formats - it might not be pretty, but it will never be lost for good either.
Like Sophia, I didn't choose Joplin because of Markdown. Unlike her, I didn't hate it, I just ignored it. What really sold me was how productive I could be on an 8" android tablet. With Markdown, I can be as productive on my tablet as my desktop (or close). The features that blew me away on the Android tablet were:
Being able to paste a quote from something I was reading and have it formatted beautifully as a quote by simply sticking a > in front of it. Wow.
being able to type [toc] at the top of my notes and then have a beautiful table of contents for the entire paper created automagically. Just using some number of # signs for the level of heading I wanted.
Easy lists. WAY easier than html. Again, couldn't be easier on my tablet.
Simpler (quicker) bold and italics on the tablet than the wysiwyg mode
All of that including functioning links exporting to pdf! from the desktop.
For me, markdown also has the advantage that I clip a lot of simplified HTML pages and I can easily edit out the crap with markdown, much easier than html.
So, mostly the Markdown's biggest benefit for me was on the android tablet.
