Articles/Saving

Markdown notes on iPhone: the five things worth knowing

Updated 13 October 2026. 2 minute read.

Markdown is formatting you type. A hash sign makes a heading, a hyphen makes a list item, two asterisks make bold. There are no toolbars to tap and nothing hidden in the file. What you see in the text is everything there is.

On a phone that turns out to be practical: your thumbs stay on the keyboard.

The five things to remember

Headings. Start a line with one or more hash signs and a space.

• # Trip to Lisbon
• ## Places to eat

Lists. Start each line with a hyphen and a space, or a number and a full stop.

• - Book the train
• 1. Preheat the oven

Bold and italics. Wrap the words in asterisks: two for bold, one for italics.

• Do not forget the passport
• Maybe

Links. The text in square brackets, the address in round ones.

• Opening hours

A blank line starts a new paragraph. That is the whole grammar most notes ever need.

Notes in Stashy

Tap the plus button and choose Text. Headings, lists and links written in Markdown are shown formatted when you read the note. On Mac the shortcut for a new note is Shift Command N.

A note is a save like any other. It sits in the same library as your links, photos and documents, gets a short summary and search keywords on your device, and can carry a reminder. That makes notes a good home for the things that do not exist anywhere else yet: a packing list, the measurements of a window, what the plumber said.

Why plain text ages well

A note written in Markdown is readable without any app at all. Open it in ten years in whatever exists then, and the hash signs and hyphens still say "heading" and "list". Notes locked in a proprietary format do not make that promise.

This is also why a Markdown export is worth having. Stashy can export your library as a readable Markdown document, among other formats.

Three small habits

• Give every note a first line that says what it is. It becomes the title, and it is what you will scan for.
• Use a list as soon as there are three of anything. Lists are faster to read on a small screen than sentences.
• Do not format for decoration. One heading and one list make a note clearer. Six levels of headings make it a document nobody opens.