When you have an iPhone, even text files feel like a custom proprietary format that is silo’d in its own world.
My problem is that while vim, markdown to HTML, and headless browser printing to PDF all work great on my desktop Linux machine there isn’t really a way to translate this to iOS and back.
If I could (a) mount my iCloud Drive in my Linux machine and (b) have a markdown centric editor on my phone then it would all work nicely. Unfortunately I feel like the lure of commercial success means Apple won’t allow the former and anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system.
I curse myself every day for mixing operating systems!
You can store iOS notes in IMAP (which is then easy to access from elsewhere) but unfortunately they're promoted* to HTML even if you start with plain text.
Would be nice if there was a "this is a plain text folder" option (but I appreciate you'd get a million customer support queries asking where the formatting has gone when people activate it accidentally.)
anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system.
But that's exactly the point of the article. It doesn't matter which app you use, or whether that specific app goes out of business or enshittifies - text files are portable to any other app. Sync it with rsync or git, they're just text.
That's why so many people on this site love Obsidian despite it being closed-source - the files it uses all exist in the most open file format of all.
I don’t really understand how this addresses my original point. With iOS I have an entire platform that can’t edit text files. What is supposedly a universal format is just not supported in this OS.
I'm in the same situation and don't have this issue. It's not that the OS doesn't support plain text files, it's that other OSs bundle in plain text editors, and iOS doesn't. Simply install one (like iAWriter), and you're done. You can't use iCloud for syncing, so then also install Syncthing (Mobius).
It's not as shiny a setup as the native offerings, but it's by no means a chore.
Except Obsidian doesn't use Markdown syntax for internal links to other Obsidian files, but (some variation of) Wiki-Syntax. This is something which I had to write my own parser for when converting Obsidian files to Org-Mode files using Pandoc https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Obs2Org
It's not about me and my configuration. The problem with Markdown is that there are so many "extensions" or variants or whatever you want to call them.
But the usage of Wiki-style links instead of Markdown or HTML links is something really, well, "interesting". While it may be easier to type than markdown links, they are certainly worse to read as "plain text".
Comments
When you have an iPhone, even text files feel like a custom proprietary format that is silo’d in its own world.
My problem is that while vim, markdown to HTML, and headless browser printing to PDF all work great on my desktop Linux machine there isn’t really a way to translate this to iOS and back.
If I could (a) mount my iCloud Drive in my Linux machine and (b) have a markdown centric editor on my phone then it would all work nicely. Unfortunately I feel like the lure of commercial success means Apple won’t allow the former and anyone working on the latter is doing it as a closed, proprietary, commercial system.
I curse myself every day for mixing operating systems!
Use SyncThing, there’s an iOS app. I use it with iA Writer with great success.
You can store iOS notes in IMAP (which is then easy to access from elsewhere) but unfortunately they're promoted* to HTML even if you start with plain text.
Would be nice if there was a "this is a plain text folder" option (but I appreciate you'd get a million customer support queries asking where the formatting has gone when people activate it accidentally.)
But that's exactly the point of the article. It doesn't matter which app you use, or whether that specific app goes out of business or enshittifies - text files are portable to any other app. Sync it with rsync or git, they're just text.
That's why so many people on this site love Obsidian despite it being closed-source - the files it uses all exist in the most open file format of all.
I don’t really understand how this addresses my original point. With iOS I have an entire platform that can’t edit text files. What is supposedly a universal format is just not supported in this OS.
I also saw this point being made elsewhere recently regarding how iPadOS still does not have TextEdit: https://www.macstories.net/stories/not-an-ipad-pro-review/#m...
I'm in the same situation and don't have this issue. It's not that the OS doesn't support plain text files, it's that other OSs bundle in plain text editors, and iOS doesn't. Simply install one (like iAWriter), and you're done. You can't use iCloud for syncing, so then also install Syncthing (Mobius).
It's not as shiny a setup as the native offerings, but it's by no means a chore.
Except Obsidian doesn't use Markdown syntax for internal links to other Obsidian files, but (some variation of) Wiki-Syntax. This is something which I had to write my own parser for when converting Obsidian files to Org-Mode files using Pandoc https://github.com/Release-Candidate/Obs2Org
If you dont like wiki-style links, you should turn it off in the Settings > Files and links > Use [[Wikilinks]].
It's not about me and my configuration. The problem with Markdown is that there are so many "extensions" or variants or whatever you want to call them. But the usage of Wiki-style links instead of Markdown or HTML links is something really, well, "interesting". While it may be easier to type than markdown links, they are certainly worse to read as "plain text".