Feature Request: Ability to turn off markdown support

ahortin

A recent update introduced the ability to use Markdown support for Secure Notes, which is really annoying. There's no indication of this on the iOS screen when you edit your Secure Note though so when I viewed a note with a bunch of Hashtags, all I saw was the text without hashtags, and in a huge font. That's all that would copy as well, when I tried to copy the text. It didn't copy the original text.

After contacting your Twitter acct, they told me about that markdown support was added and said that you can use three backticks (```) before and after the note to disable the markdown. While this is convenient in the short term, I don't want to have to go back and edit all my notes to add backticks. I also don't want to have to remember to add them into future notes. On top of that, it's incredibly annoying trying to type a backtick on the iOS keyboard. Plain text notes are more convenient when you want to copy that data and use it in other locations.

Can you please add an option in all your apps to disable Markdown on Secure Notes.
Thanks

---

1Password Version: 7.1.1
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: iOS 11.4
Sync Type: Dropbox

Ben

Hi @ahortin,

Thanks for the feedback. We are looking at how to best address this for a future update. Unfortunately I don’t have more information than that to share at the moment, but it is a desire that we’re aware of and are brainstorming on.

Ben

ref: apple-460

ahortin

Thanks @Ben. I hope you guys can make this happen. 1PW isn't a Word Processor so having pretty formatting on my (note) content is not something that's needed. While I can see some use in supporting markdown, even as a developer myself, it's something that'd I'd rarely, if ever, actually use in 1PW. Plain text content is considerably more useful. It would make more sense to enable the ability to turn on Markdown on a each individual note, if wanted, rather than forcing everyone to use it on every note.
Thanks.

AGAlumB

I hear you, but at the same time we have a lot of people who want this. Not everyone shares your preference. ;) And it isn't a simple matter to add an option to turn this off and on in different places, as it's applied to a specific field type. It's definitely something we're looking at though, especially as we take everyone's feedback into account. Cheers! :)

dankirsh

I agree with Ben that markdown should be able to be disabled. I used a lot of markdown-type characters in my plain-text notes, which are now completed messed up with formatting. It would take me a long time to fix everything. I'm debating whether I should fix it, or wait for 1Password to release an update that allows me to disable it.

I'm sure you don't comment on future features too much, but if you could let us know if it is coming that would help me decide whether to devote a considerable amount of time reformatting my notes or if I should just wait for the disable feature to be added.

I would say that adding it as default, without the ability to disable it, was a bit of an error because your users were not anticipating future formatting issues when writing these notes. Basically, you didn't consider backwards compatibility.

Otherwise, 1Password 7 has been great, so thanks for making a solid product.

Ben

We do agree that it makes sense to have some way to turn off formatting but I can’t make any promises at this point. Personally I wouldn’t go through every note until further info is available. If there are a handful that are frequently used you may want to consider editing them and putting

```

at the beginning and end of the note, which tells markdown that the text contained within those marks is preformatted. It should look like this:

```
preformatted text
This text will apppear preformatted.
**Characters that would normally cause _formatting_ are ignored**
```

Thanks for the feedback.

Ben

do_fr

Ditto. I didn't ask that you make all 88 of my Secure Notes unreadable. Adding a feature is one thing, breaking existing text is another. How about instead you require some specific mark in order to enable Markdown?

Ben

Thanks for sharing your perspective on this do_fr.

Ben

1kennethfeldman

+1 for ability to ## turn off Markdown. If the '''three ticks''' method works, then just provide a button to turn it off as well. I have HUNDREDS of secure notes that are all messed up now.

AGAlumB

Thanks for letting us know your preference. :)

zaphr

Are there any further updates on a feature switch to disable markdown formatting?

I use my own plain text mark up format and have 683 notes going back to 2009 that are now illegible.

It's frustrating to see simple core functionality that I have used daily for many years intentionally broken due to the introduction of a new feature. It was always drummed into us - don't break users unless you absolutely have to.

Character encoding aside, plain text should be one of the safest and most enduring formats available, whole operating systems run on it.

From what I can gauge from the comments above it doesn't look like fixing this is a priority, but I'm hoping someone can confirm either way?

I've also been investigating automation to export the existing notes from 1password for import into another product but from what I can tell it doesn't look like there is a public api?

As a related side note, I have also hit bugs with the text of some notes being duplicated on save after an edit since the markdown introduction. The entire body of some notes gets duplicated, with the 2 versions separated by ===
I guess there is some diffing / versioning logic brought in with the markdown feature that is buggy.

Ben

Hi @zaphr,

Welcome to the forum.

Are there any further updates on a feature switch to disable markdown formatting?

Not at this time. It is something we’re looking at.

From what I can gauge from the comments above it doesn't look like fixing this is a priority, but I'm hoping someone can confirm either way?

We’re intent on finding a solution but I don’t know at this point what form that solution will come in, or when.

I've also been investigating automation to export the existing notes from 1password for import into another product but from what I can tell it doesn't look like there is a public api?

We have a CLI, which may help:

1Password command-line tool: Getting started

As a related side note, I have also hit bugs with the text of some notes being duplicated on save after an edit since the markdown introduction. The entire body of some notes gets duplicated, with the 2 versions separated by ===
I guess there is some diffing / versioning logic brought in with the markdown feature that is buggy.

Thanks for the report... we’ll have to look into that. I can’t say I recall seeing any similar reports. Are there any specific steps you can think of that cause this to occur?

Ben

zaphr

Thanks @ben

Thanks for the report... we’ll have to look into that. I can’t say I recall seeing any similar reports. Are there any specific steps you can think of that cause this to occur?

I just hit the bug with a new test note this moment but I was only able to trigger it once and can't narrow down exactly which part of the note caused the issue. Version 7.0.7 macOS 10.13.6

Created a new note with the following text:

Saved the note, edited to remove a single character (aa) and saved again with the following result.

Random makes me suspect async network logic but just a wild guess... Could also be auto save conflicting with manual (Cmd S)

zaphr

We’re intent on finding a solution but I don’t know at this point what form that solution will come in, or when.

Thanks for the honest response. Unfortunately I've stopped using 1password for note taking and I will need to look for another product. I'm still surprised that it was considered reasonable to treat all historical and future plain text notes as markdown.

I waited on adding input this issue as I assumed it was just backlogged in the rush to get the new markdown functionality out and would come in a new point release. But it has now been nearly 3 months and it sounds like a fix would still be months away, if at all.

I've been a vocal user and promoter of 1password for many years but to be honest I've lost faith with this change. I've always seen 1password's role as keeping my data safe and secure, and from my perspective this change has functionally corrupted much of my data.

Plain text isn't markdown, and markdown cannot handle plain text. In the same way plain text isn't json and a json parser can't handle plain text. Github for example doesn't parse all text files as markdown, only those highlighted as markdown. And if they did it would break documentation for many projects.

Ben

Thanks for the feedback @zaphr. I'm sorry we let you down. We'll continue to investigate that bug you've reported and further improvements regarding markdown.

Ben

zaphr

Hi @Ben

Is there anything further on when a feature switch for markdown will be released?

Last week I put out a call to our company to find out who uses 1password. Many had never heard of it but I was also surprised just how many people actually use it, even some who are not very technical. I followed up by asking if any of them were having any issues with it, no mention of notes or markdown, and nearly all of them reported some variation of their old notes getting "messed up". Most of these people have never even heard of markdown.

Is 1password doing any customer satisfaction feedback at all? I realize that the loudest incoming voices tend to influence feature prioritization in some companies, but there is no way that the people who told me they were having issues would ever take to twitter or these forums to complain, even if I were to ask them to.

It has now been more than 4 months since this problem was introduced. I also saw there was a major release the other day and reading through the release notes I couldn't believe all that new functionality was deemed higher priority than this issue.

Ben

@zaphr

I don’t have anything new to report, but I do have a call with our development team later today and will bring up your feedback. We do collect direct customer feedback (i.e. what is offered to us) but we do not do any analytics within the apps etc as we believe privacy is more important. That said there are a lot of factors that go into deciding what our team works on, and while customer feedback is certainly one of them, it isn’t the only way we determine that.

We do appreciate the report, and what customers such as yourself have to say does have an impact. Thank you.

Ben

rlh

@zaphr said,

Character encoding aside, plain text should be one of the safest and most enduring formats available, whole operating systems run on it.

Plain text should be considered the lowest common denominator, the default. It's the safest format and most convenient.

It would make more sense to enable the ability to turn on Markdown on a each individual note, if wanted

+1 on @ahortin's recommended solution (as I've probably said elsewhere).

Regarding how we go here...I don't doubt regarding Markdown that there are

a lot of people who want this

but the interesting conversation among @zaphr's co-workers where

nearly all of them reported some variation of their old notes getting "messed up". Most of these people have never even heard of markdown.

highlights a challenging part of taking user inputs. You heard and responded to customer demand (Bravo!) for Markdown, but there was no way to gauge customer pain for implementing it.

1. Presumably, there were no voices saying, "we like plaintext, don't change anything". And apparently there was not enough consideration of breakage of existing plaintext notes. I know in my case I lost a lot of useful indenting.
2. You didn't consider the "never heard of Markdown" folks. If you had, I wonder if you would have released Markdown support as you did rather than including a Markdown GUI (something like the icons here in this forum) that would make the new capability user accessible.

And if both of these things were considered I suspect we'd have gotten some kind of Markdown/plaintext toggle like you see on TextEdit.

Please don't take the above as, "the 1Password team is irresponsible, incompetent, arrogant, etc". You guys are among the most responsive and customer-friendly folks I know. And I've seen multiple posts acknowledging you can't incorporate all customer requests so you understand limitations. I'm just wondering how you might best also respond to the silent, "I like it how it is right now" customers when considering any future features.

Ben

That’s a really interesting point, @rlh. I mean obviously “let’s not do anything” is the path of least effort, so I suppose that is an inherent consideration, especially when we already have a list of things longer than any of our combined arms of things we need to or would like to change. But it is of course as you pointed out extremely difficult if not impossible to judge the volume of that position amongst customers. You’re right: it is incredibly rare that anyone would write into us and say “things are perfect as is, don’t change anything.”

As for markdown... we did brainstorm some ideas regarding this situation. I’m not ready to comment further quite yet but I can say that this hasn’t fallen off the radar.

Ben

AGAlumB

You’re right: it is incredibly rare that anyone would write into us and say “things are perfect as is, don’t change anything.”

Quite the opposite. :lol:

rlh

As for markdown... we did brainstorm some ideas regarding this situation. I’m not ready to comment further quite yet but I can say that this hasn’t fallen off the radar.

Another point of feedback, probably obvious. If you implement some sort of Markdown vs. plaintext toggle it seem like using one of the fixed width fonts for plaintext is the right thing to do. Right now, even if I don't include any accidental Markdown tags, the proportional font messes up spacing for me.

Ben

We’ve standardized on font now so I think we’re likely to stick with that for a while.

Ben

christianmlong

Ben, can you give us an update on the development team call from October 4? Is a plain-text option (no markdown) on the table? I'm using the ``` trick for now, but it doesn't handle newlines right, and all of my notes are messed up.

Thank you!

AGAlumB

@christianmlong: We don't share the details of private calls publicly. :tongue: But we're experimenting with an option to disable Markdown in the current beta.