No Markdown support in Google Drive after all these years Why does Google not (want to?) support the full Markdown experience in Google Drive? I'm not talking about the limited, mostly useless support in Docs, but supporting opening, reading / editing real (.MD extension) files. Just, why? |
Both figuratively and literally.
This question is kind of like asking why you can't edit Illustrator projects in Photoshop.
Why do you trust Google and Microsoft, companies known to spy on their users, rather then some small company who would go under if someone found out they spied on their users?
I'm not saying everyone that's using Google or Microsoft are stupid, I'm trying to understand why people trust Google and Microsoft, is it because so many are already using them, or is it that you have been using them for a long time because you had no other choice ?
After we finally evicted him, the house was strewn with several ambitious but abandoned projects.
Almost as bad as Google.
Additionally, the "people who know what Markdown is but also like trusting Google with their files" demographic is vanishingly small and not who Drive is targeting at all.
I'd love to have a google docs option of creating a "simple doc", that is backed by markdown and only supports the basics (headers, paragraphs, lists, maybe tables) and have a WYSIWYG for non-tech people and a (maybe git-based?) workflow for people used to markdown.
Something like what azure devops and github does with their wikis.
I want markdown on sharepoint.
I think there is another sizable set which heavily uses wiki. At my work, most people use it (a very small set of people use SharePoint for mainly PowerPoint or formatting heavy docs).
There are lots of us who use Google drive at work that love md.
If you're forced to use Drive at work, Google isn't targeting you either. It's targeting the C-suites above you who buy the software, and they don't know what Markdown is. The fact that engineers are lamenting the lack of Markdown in Google Drive shows how much influence they have over those decisions.
That's not incompatible with the demographic being vanishingly small and not who Drive is targeting at all.
"A lot of us" can still be an insignificant number compared to the Google Drive userbase and target demographic.
Now, "more than 10% of Google Drive users" might start getting somewhere. But I doubt it's even close to 1%. Google Drive is not a tool targeted to developers especially, and developers are not that much of a demographic to matter for mass market services.
I however understand your issue with privacy as any app can just steal your content without you knowing. The solution for privacy is to sandbox/jail the app into an environment where it can just access a limited set of resources, for example you can use an apparmor profile where the app can just access a special folder, and disable all networking. That special folder could be your google drive mount.
There's zero benefit for them to add it, and the majority of people who want markdown probably aren't using Google Drive to render their documents.
That being said Google Doc’s support for Word documents is confusing as hell. I wish at least it was made to be more visually distinct since people (such as: me) get confused all the time between editing a Google Doc, a Word document converted to Google Docs (where now there are likely two branched versions of the same document), and just using the Google Docs interface to edit a Word document directly.
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en
It's not great, but you'll find it useful if you have the muscle memory of `* thing` for bullet lists and `## My section` for headings.
They have a huge backlog of features that are catch-up to a strategically threatening disruptive competitor, and they can’t deliver those. Markdown support is below all that in priority.
Google Drive, to me, is object storage with a consumer-friendly user interface. It does not sound like the right place for constantly-changing text files for which you'd want revision history and commit-oriented editing.
Git diffing doesn't play nice with paragraph-based prose.
It could be a very fast, efficient file browser with lots of format previews. It's not.
Doing basic "file manager" things such as viewing/extracting files from a .zip, editing a plain-text file, or viewing markdown… all those are just "too complicated" for a small indie company like Google.
Drive is incredibly powerful, and yet it's just awful compared to what it could be. If someone one day makes a "better web UI" for Drive with better functionality, but that still uses google drive in the backend, damn I want in.
One thing that bites me every few months is that on iOS, the Google Drive file provider extension does not support basic operations. Like I think I have tried to just save a file to Google Drive via Files and it never uploaded. It’s not just that this stuff works with iCloud Drive, but also with Dropbox, Box, and even SFTP shares mounted via Secure Shellfish.
And then I use it on plain Markdown text in a GMail compose window. The rich formatted output it produces is useful for sending richly-formatted GMail messages, but it can also be copy-pasted into a Google Doc (e.g. via https://docs.new), and it comes out really nicely, including support for headers, sub-headers, links, code blocks, and the rest. The main issue is that this is a one-way process, but so long as you keep the .md source files somewhere else, this trick lets you share a richly-formatted doc with others for final commenting/editing/etc. in the GDocs interface.
Google Cloud could just create their project folders in drive, let drive open the code editors, and let you do all your coding from there, but that team knows how bad the UI is, and this team is excused because they're the "office/consumer" offering. Both are paid to make separate UX, neither trusts the other, and it's categorical, so not even a conflict. Except, then there's the user that is forced to be incompatible members of two categories when they're not.
In an ideal googleverse, you'd login to chrome and it'd have everything. It would be one service, metered by resource consumption, and you'd never have to leave any single window opened for a purpose, to get that "computational" thing done.
I find more critical that for all the dependecy on COM, the IDL editing experience in Visual Studio still sucks after about 30 years, and is basically like editing bare bones text files.
You can style the document in some other form of markup.
You can use the tools given to produce the result you want.
It strikes me as modern cargo-culting to expect cloud providers like Google to cater to niche crowds. We already know they don't care very much about the long tail. If Drive isn't supporting markdown, it's pretty obvious by now that it is not a priority for them.
And the tone of the title on here is pretty damn presumptuous. It's like new gamers complaining that some new game doesn't come with photo mode, cloud save, 100% customizable clothing, etc, all these optional things that used to be ancillary but are now somehow a requirement.
That's why Atlassian supports MD for Jira and Confluence. Google Docs is first and foremost a Word Online competitor.
Developers are a handful of millions. Developers that use markdown outside of where they're forced to and actively want Google Drive to support it are even fewer.
I'm not sure where you're getting those stats but a source would be nice. I would suspect that their customer base and/or core usage is made up of far more tech company employees via Cloud and Workspaces than it is average Joes backing up documents.
That's what I call a bubble.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17613442/google-drive-one...
And that's in 2023.
As for the numbers of organizational paying users in 2023 (corporate users) were 6 million, compared to "over a billion" (in 2023). And of those 6 million organizational users of course only a smaller share are developers. Regular file sharing and G-suite stuff for office workers is the order of the day.
Really? I'm curious, are the people you know using Dropbox, OneDrive, or something else? Or are they just not sharing files in a public cloud?
I started to retort "how do you even collaborate on spreadsheets with your friends?" before realizing maybe I just have some, err, unique friend groups.
In the non tech-centric groups of friends and family, filesystem solutions have been superceded by all-in-ones like Google/Apple Photos, Notes etc.
Most people I know also use an iPhone meaning they're driven towards data storage that is built around an app use case, rather than simulating a desktop FS on another device.
Many of them use Google or Microsoft solutions for work though.