Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

I cannot understand how Apple notes works sometimes.

For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines. Just fighting the tool.

Stuff like this really makes me dislike it. I find syntax highlighting with markdown preferable than a WYSIWYG rich text editor. I get why people who don't know markdown prefer it, but the advantages diminish significantly if you know markdown.

View on HN

I actually love that this was glossed over by him and most of the comments. I used Apple notes daily for years - hundreds or maybe thousand+ notes in it. The idea that markdown is easy to mess up compared to Apple notes is at best partially true. Apple notes messes up too, and in weird ways. The reality is if not markdown, its using its own syntax under the hood that is certainly not bug free, and will have its own (proprietary) bugs to deal with. And since its not markdown, you can't drop to raw text to fix it, or even understand it. Which is the whole reason more and more apps are moving towards it: You don't need to re-invent the wheel for all the standard note features, including your own special flavor of bugs. Apple notes realistically can't use Markdown in its UI. But if it could, having a toggle to flip to it would be lovely, especially when their UI gets buggy - there's always a plain text work around that's easy to understand, and fully human readable on its own.

> For instance, sometimes after indenting a line I cannot un-indent on future lines

I feel like this is why a lot of us use Markdown/Org, because this is the most annoying issue in Word to me since 2003. Why are the indentation rules so arbitrary?

I don’t use word processors often (less than once a year in general), and did something comparatively advanced in LibreOffice Writer a few months ago, involving mixing English and an Indian language, and trying to use styles and such (equivalent to tacking on a stylesheet in HTML). I learned that the toolbar button for lists creates a list with hard-coded inline styles for bullet appearance, indent amounts, &c. If you want to change it, you can’t use that button any more, and have to make your own style with the appropriate properties (not easy) and apply them to each list item.

Part of the mess is that it doesn’t seem to actually model lists, just paragraphs which might have a list level associated with them. I have no idea why this was ever deemed acceptable: it precludes multiple markers on one line:

  1. a) Sorry, but you can’t do this.
     b) It’s not expressible.
  2. You need a paragraph first.
     a) Then it can be done.

My guess is that LibreOffice inherited this limitation from Word. No idea if Word is so affected.

Indenting and unindenting on iOS is one of my favorite features — you can just swipe right and left on lines to indent and unindent.

I've not experienced any issues unindenting but not sure how you're doing it?

On macOS, tab and shift-tab always work for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com