Forum Discussion
Please add Markdown support
Please add support for Markdown editing/rendering. EverNote and Boostnote all support this, but OneNote still lacks this feature, while it remains so many developers' main notetaking tool. Take myself as an example, I enjoy its seamless integration with OneDrive and powerful search function, but find it difficult to properly take down coding related notes -- I was forced to format code snippets into monospaced font with shading to make them look like "code snippets".
To elaborate the user story about this idea:
- The user can create a new "regular page" or a "Markdown page". If the latter, then Markdown tags entered are rendered as you type (e.g. #title, >quote, *bold*, `code`...)
- The user might also enjoy a "cell editing" mode (similar to Jupyter Notebook). So if the cursor is placed in a cell, then it changes to raw text view. And once escaped from this cell, it gets rendered. And maybe enable some Jupyter/VS Code stype shortcut keys, too (Alt+Up/Down to move the cell, Alt+Shift+Up/Down to duplicate the cell, Ctrl+Shift+K to kill a line, etc)
This way notetaking will be more efficient/fun, and many developers would thank MS!
73 Replies
- Signed in just to +1 to this.
I'm just about to convert to obsidian due to the lack of code blocks and chaos that is OneNote.... however the picture resizing is hard to leave. Markdown would make our lives much better. Microsoft, please add it! 🙂
I literally just signed up to this forum for the sole purpose of voting this up.
- I often work with GitHub repos that use .md files to organize written information. I would use OneNote a lot more if there was a way to open .md files in onenote, ie add a page to my notebook that is an .md file, or load in information directly from an .md file -- not just an embedded file preview.
OneNote cannot load in .md files *at all*, even just to show the raw text. It's disappointing and surprising that OneNote can't do what even notepad.exe can.
My current approach to solving this problem is going to be opening the .md file in Notepad, copy-pasting it into a onenote page, and using the add-in OneMark to try to format each line. We shall see how it goes... there are a lot of lines. 😞
Thanks to the Microsoft folks for reading this feedback!- Hi, in OneMark, you can just click 'Import Markdown' to import .md files.
- Which is super great (thank you!), but not available cross platform, like on their web client or on Android. Native support is still the ideal here.
- Yessss, it would be so nice to be able to format on the fly on every system
- Adding another voice to this. I'm an M365 customer and yet I use Obsidian for most notes. I'll add that Markdown support for things like Planner would make it vastly more useful... I'm honestly mostly working out of Github for even non-technical projects right now because the bare-bones basics that most people have come to expect don't exist in these products. It's really frustrating and I'd love to see it changed.
- There is no good reason why this doesn't exist in OneNote. It's the very reason I no longer use this application. I use Marktext and Typora, I even tried Obsidian. Microsoft these developers are running circles around you on this.
I would love to come back to OneNote, but no Markdown, no adoption.- Yes, there's no technical reason. But maybe Markdown is too open for M$ and would prevent vendor lock in ... Who the hell knows.
xiaoli7Microsoft
Totally agree! frank-yifei-wang Markdown is well-organized.
- Adding my voice to this request. I moved away from OneNote because it was difficult to use compared to Dropbox Paper, but due to security and privacy issues the Dropbox team refuses to address, am looking for alternatives again. That said, 5 minutes in OneNote was enough to set me searching again...
Try Upnote. The best! develleoper
- Agreed! It's about time to have Markdown support.
