One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.
Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened.
(It’s too bad that magic usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)
EDIT: Does anyone else know of any companies like this for office supplies? Notebooks, pens, inks etc.? I support Noodler's Ink since they are entirely US-based, but even they have some of their pens made in India etc.
Counterpoint: Yes they can.
There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not).
For some people the end result of digital notes is vastly superior to anything they can scribble in a notebook.
Paper offers a different level of expression. The comparison is thus not equivalent.
Usually when you offer a counter point you don’t just disagree, but provide some basis or example to show the statement or proposition in question is false.
Fetishising notebooks aside, parent mentioned expressiveness. Clearly everything that can be _expressed_ in Markdown can be expressed on paper, but it’s not clear that the opposite is true.
Regarding my original point, it’s what you use to get to the finished product that counts, and I maintain that hacking markdown is inferior to freeform pen and paper thinking.
Pilot V5 RT refills fit into the Everyman Grafton pen ($35)
I used that for a while but found the pen a bit too large.
Nowadays I either use an Energel [2] or the classic Pilot V5.
[1]: https://everyman.co/collections/frontpage/products/grafton-p... [2]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0776M8VY1
It has built in OCR so a search will find my handwritten notes as well.