What Is Markdown and Why So Many Note-Taking Apps Use It Today
You’ve typed ** to make something bold. Or maybe ## to create a heading. You’ve probably done this in Slack, Discord, Reddit, or a note-taking app without thinking twice about it.
That’s Markdown. And most people don’t know it has a name.
Over the past decade, Markdown has quietly become the default way to format text in dozens of apps. Developers love it because it’s simple to implement. Users love it because it’s fast to type. And note-taking apps have adopted it almost universally—some as a core feature, others as the entire foundation of how they work.
But here’s what most people miss: there’s a big difference between apps that support Markdown and apps that are built on Markdown. One approach gives you convenience. The other gives you ownership. This distinction determines whether you’ll own your notes ten years from now.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a way to format text using simple keyboard symbols. Instead of clicking toolbar buttons or memorizing keyboard shortcuts, you type characters that represent formatting.
John Gruber created it in 2004 with help from Aaron Swartz. Their goal was simple:
Make formatting easy to write and easy to read, even without rendering. They wanted something a person could glance at and immediately understand, even if they’d never seen it before.
Here’s what the basic syntax looks like:
| What you type | What you get |
| # Heading | A large heading |
| **bold** | bold |
| *italic* | italic |
| – item | A bullet point |
| [link](url) | A clickable link |
| > quote | A blockquote |
The formatting is obvious even when you look at the raw text. You don’t need special software to understand what **important** means. The asterisks practically shout “emphasis.”
Markdown files are plain text with a .md extension. You can open them in Notepad, TextEdit, or any text editor on any device. They’ll still be readable in fifty years because plain text doesn’t become obsolete.
Why does Markdown exist?
Before Markdown, you had two main options for formatting text.
Word processors like Microsoft Word gave you full control over fonts, colors, and layouts. But they saved files in proprietary formats that other programs couldn’t always read correctly. Open a .doc file from 2003 today and you might find broken formatting, missing fonts, or corrupted content. The file depends on specific software to display properly.
HTML gave you web-compatible formatting that any browser could display. But writing <strong>bold</strong> for every bold word gets tedious fast. HTML was designed for machines to parse, not for humans to write by hand. Nobody wants to draft a quick note surrounded by angle brackets and closing tags.
Markdown sits between these two extremes. You can write it quickly with minimal syntax. The files stay readable as plain text even without any rendering. And when you need polished output, you can convert Markdown to HTML, PDF, Word documents, or almost any other format.
The trade-off is that Markdown handles basic formatting well but doesn’t support complex layouts. No columns, no custom fonts, no precise image positioning, no colored text. For notes, documentation, and everyday writing, that’s usually fine. You’re trading visual flexibility for longevity and portability.
What’s the difference between apps “built on” Markdown and apps that “support” Markdown?
This is where things get important.
Many apps advertise Markdown support. But that phrase means different things depending on how the app works under the hood.
Apps built on Markdown use .md files as their foundation. When you create a note, the app saves an actual Markdown file to your computer. The app is essentially a fancy editor for those files. Take away the app, and the files remain.
Obsidian works this way. Every note is a .md file sitting in a folder you control. You can open that folder in your file browser and see all your notes as individual files. Open any of them in Notepad and you’ll see readable text with Markdown formatting. The app doesn’t hide anything from you.
Other examples include Typora, iA Writer, Logseq, and Joplin. These apps treat your notes as files first and formatting second. They’re tools for working with Markdown, not containers that hold your data hostage.
Apps that support Markdown let you use Markdown syntax, but they don’t store your notes as .md files. The app interprets your Markdown as you type and converts it to the app’s internal format. The Markdown disappears into a database or proprietary structure.
Notion works this way. You can type **bold** and it becomes bold text. You can type /heading to create a heading. But Notion doesn’t save a .md file anywhere. It stores your content in its own database format. The Markdown is just an input shortcut, not the actual storage format.
Same with Roam Research, Craft, Capacities, and most other modern note-taking apps. You get the convenience of Markdown shortcuts without the underlying file structure. The typing experience feels similar, but what happens behind the scenes is completely different.
How can you tell the difference?
Here’s a simple test.
Find where the app stores your notes. Can you navigate to a folder on your computer and see .md files? Can you open one in Notepad or TextEdit and read it without any special software?
If yes, the app is built on Markdown.
If no—if your notes live in a database, a proprietary format, or only on the company’s servers—the app supports Markdown syntax but stores data differently.
Some apps make this obvious. Obsidian asks you to choose a folder when you first open it. That folder is where all your notes live as .md files. You can back it up, sync it with any cloud service, or move it to a new computer by copying the folder.
Other apps obscure this entirely. Notion stores everything on their servers. You can export your data, but you don’t have direct access to files on your machine. Your notes exist in Notion’s server, accessible through Notion’s interface.
This matters because it affects what happens if the app disappears.
Apps built on Markdown leave you with readable files. Even if Obsidian shut down tomorrow, every note would still exist as a plain text file on your computer. You could open them in any text editor, import them into another Markdown app, or just keep using them as-is.
Apps that support Markdown require you to export your data first. If Notion announced they were shutting down, you’d need to use their export feature before losing access. And depending on how you exported, you might lose formatting, links between pages, embedded databases, or other features that don’t translate cleanly to other formats.
Why did note-taking apps adopt Markdown?
Markdown spread because it solved problems for both developers and users.
For developers, Markdown is easy to implement. The syntax is well-documented, and open-source parsers exist for every programming language. Adding Markdown support to an app takes far less work than building a rich text editor from scratch. A small team can add basic Markdown rendering in days, not months.
For users, Markdown became familiar through platforms they already used. GitHub made Markdown the standard for documentation and README files. Reddit used a Markdown variant for comments. Slack and Discord adopted it for message formatting. Millions of people learned the basics—bold, italic, headings, lists—without realizing they were learning a specific syntax.
When note-taking apps started offering Markdown support, users didn’t need tutorials. They already knew that ** meant bold and # meant heading. The learning curve had already been flattened by years of casual use elsewhere.
The “no vendor lock-in” promise helped too. Users who’d lost notes to discontinued apps wanted something more permanent. Markdown’s plain text foundation made it the obvious choice for apps marketing themselves as user-friendly and open. “Your notes are just files” became a selling point.
Today, Markdown support is expected. Apps that don’t offer it get questions about why. It’s become part of the baseline feature set, like having a mobile app or cloud sync.
Does this matter for your notes?
Apps built on Markdown give you .md files you can access anytime with any text editor. Apps that support Markdown give you the typing experience but store data in their own format.
But if longevity matters to you, it’s worth checking before you commit years of notes to a single app. Ask yourself: if this app vanished tomorrow, could I still open my files in Notepad? That question tells you everything about whether your notes will last.
