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Comment by Emendo | Hacker News Reader

Plain text is great when I am on my laptop, but not as well as soon as I want to, for example, check or update my todo list on OneDrive/Google Drive on my phone or on my work computer.

I have found myself moving back into proprietary formats like docx and xlsx because of the above.

All I want is a folder full of markdown files (and other files that need to stay in their original format), but I not could find a way to make it work on mobile.

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I use Joplin, it uses markdown so I have my folder of files I can grep. It also has a mobile app and you can set up syncing with WebDAV, I use Seafile.

+1 for Joplin. I moved all my work notes to it and set up Syncthing with my phone and homeserver. Works beautifully.

Seems like there should be an app that serves as an editor for you well enough. The syncing problem is only a problem because Apple (I'm assuming your on iOS, and I don't know as much about android) doesn't give you a fucking filesystem.

I'd be pretty happy with something like ViMobile, and `git push` personally.

This situation has improved a lot within the last year. I'd highly recommend trying out a combination of a-Shell (includes vim!), and WorkingCopy for git. Both of these can access any folder in Files or any external file provider (even outside of their sandbox). SecureShellFish is also great if you want to interface with a server.

And before anyone asks what ViMobile is... I wouldn't know, developing applications for iOS is stupidly hard.

What about the native files app? Right now it seems Bear is using it.

That seems odd... at least on iOS, aren’t there a million markdown editors? What problem did you run in to?

That editing text files on mobile sucks, whereas selecting a date with the date selector, toggling an item as done with a checkbox click etc are much better...

That just seems a limitation of mobile keyboards: there’s no arrow keys so markdown editors lack navigation. One benefit of iOS is that if you hold the space key down it allows you to freely move your cursor around.

Markor works well on Android.

Thank you for this recommendation. Joplin didn't allow me to manage the files manually, but this gives me far more control. As a bonus, it supports todo.txt, which I was already using. Paired with Dropsync, this is my find of the month.

This is what I'm using now, and it seems to be working well although I'll point out that it is nagware. I'll put up with the intermittent begging for donations over ads, in-app purchases, and data mining you'd find on other apps.

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