The Best Way to Bulk Export Your Apple Notes to More Portable Markdown Format

iPhone showing the Notes app open with words New Year Resolutions.

Apple Notes are only really usable inside Apple Notes. If you are regularly working across other operating systems, like I do, this can actually be inconvenient (Steve expects you to only work inside the Apple ecosystem). There is iCloud login, but the editing is not really optimised for the devices you use.

An alternative is to export your Apple Notes into Markdown format, which will allow you to use any Markdown editor across any device to edit those notes. The linked article below explains how to do that quite easily.

I’m using my own self-hosted Nextcloud server to sync my notes between all my devices, but you could also use Dropbox to start with, or any other sync service.

The nice things about the Markdown format are:
1. It’s an open standard which is future-proof in that it is not locked into any vendor service that disappears one day.
2. It’s free.
3. You can pick the best Markdown editor for each platform you’re using.

On my Linux desktop, I’m still using Obsidian as my Markdown editor, and the Ulauncher launcher allows me to quick search my Obsidian notes without even open the app.

See https://lifehacker.com/the-best-way-to-bulk-export-your-apple-notes-1850685680