Google Docs is for grandma. Markdown is for actual work.

I know that sounds harsh, but hear me out.

Developers love Markdown because it’s extremely portable. It’s just a text file with some agreed-upon formatting symbols.

No proprietary binary format, no vendor lock-in, no mysterious corruption when you open it in a different app. If you want your writing to survive the digital apocalypse, Markdown is your best bet.

This isn’t a post explaining what Markdown is, the point of this post is simpler:

Google Docs sucks for anyone who wants real Markdown support, and I wish Google would actually fix this.

Their current “Markdown support” is a joke. When Google Docs detects something that looks like a heading, it helpfully deletes your Markdown syntax and converts it to rich text. Thanks, I hate it.

It’s basically impossible to write in Markdown in Google Docs because the app fights you every step of the way. The only real support they offer is exporting to Markdown format. That’s not what I want. I want to write in Markdown, not just export to it after the fact.

In a real Markdown editor like Obsidian or 30 other options, you can toggle between source view and preview. You see the raw text with all its formatting symbols, then flip to see the rendered result.

It’s clean, it’s simple, it works. In Google Docs? There’s no source view. It’s only rich text, forever and ever, amen. They built the whole thing to mimic Microsoft Word, and that’s all you get.

I don’t need another Word clone. I’ve got, brought to you by Copilot Word, if I want Word.

I would gladly sacrifice whatever bloated features necessary to get rid of all that stuff I don’t care about, as long as it has real Markdown support.

What “Real Support” Would Look Like

• A source/preview toggle (like literally every other Markdown editor)
• Stop auto-converting my syntax into rich text formatting
• Let me paste Markdown without it being “helpfully” transformed
• Native .md file handling, not just export

Is that so much to ask?

All this is to say: we probably need a new product entirely. Google’s not going to rebuild Docs from the ground up, and Microsoft’s not going to make Word understand that some of us don’t want 47 ribbon tabs and a formatting pane that takes up half the screen.

But, you know, whatever. I guess the best we get these days is another VS Code clone.

If you’re a fellow Markdown Apostle stuck in a rich-text world, I feel your pain. Until then, I’ll be over here editing in Obsidian for some things and Cursor for others.