Why is it so hard (or impossible) to get a clean Markdown export out of Obsidian and Standard Notes?

30 April, 2026 - Categories: notetaking - Tags: Markdown, Obsidian, Standard Notes, Iotas, QOwnNotes, Folio, front matter

By Steven Rosenberg

What's the deal with exporting Markdown files out of two of the most popular notetaking apps, Obsidian and Standard Notes?

Obsidian can't (or more accurately won't) export an .md file from the base system, and none of the plugins I've tried can do it right, which for me means without added escapes preceding the brackets that's are in my blog posts' TOML front matter.

Standard Notes doesn't even allow an export with the free plan.

Meanwhile Nextcloud offers file exports (in the form of downloads via the Files app) just like the Linux desktop apps I've been using: Iotas, QOwnNotes and Folio. And the files are ready to go into a static site generator, which in my case is Zola.