I wanted to add a note here for those interested, that I’ve created an automation that converts your outline to Markdown and pasted it here.
Note: This doesn’t look for styles on words, like bold or italic – just things like headers, lists, quotes, tasks, and code blocks.
What does Markdown support mean?
OmniOutliner is one of my most used apps. I’m in it every day. I do most of my writing in it.
Normally, my final OmniOutliner product becomes a PDF. That is essential.
However, I am now moving most of my notes and info into a PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) system. I’m using Obsidian, which is made up of Markdown notes. OmniOutliner EXPORT would allow me to integrate my OmniOutliner documents into my PKM system and to get more from the work I am already doing. For me, this is going to be very important going forward.
IMPORT would mean being able to take something that I’ve been working on in Obsidian and importing it to OmniOutliner for development. While this would be useful, at this moment, it wouldn’t be nearly as important as export.
As for rendering Markdown in OmniOutliner, I don’t care about that at all. I use best-in-class tools for each stage of my work, and I don’t see myself ever using OmniOutliner as a render engine. I have other places for that.
I just need to get OO docs out of OO in Markdown, and maybe, going forward, to get MD docs into OO.
(As a matter of interest, and as the developer of filterCSV) has anyone tried exporting from OmniOutliner to OPML and then throwing through filterCSV to make Markdown?
If you tried this and there are issues let me know - either via the GitHub repository Issues mechanism or by some other means. I have OmniOutliner so I can recreate and, hopefully, fix.
Note: You can make iThoughts CSV this way, too.
filterCSV is here: https://github.com/MartinPacker/filterCSV
I am managing this problem by exporting to OPML, opening the exported OPML in iThoughtX, previewing the opened file in Marked 2 and saving to Markdown (unfortunately the iThough doesnt export good Markdown with headers for Obsidian); I can do the other way around by opening the markdown file in iThoughtX and exporting to OPML which I can import in OmniOutliner;
However, having markdown support directly in OmniOutliner would be a great deal for many people in the community!
9 years, 48 likes, more than 15k views. Multiple people have attempted to answer the questions in ways that would be useful, some have provided external scripts, more have used routes through tools that no longer exist (e.g. iThoughts) and despite all that activity, there’s still no native support for markdown.
During that time, I’ve paid for several upgrades, but each time, this specific request holds me back. Each time a new major version of OmniOutliner comes out, I search around to see if there’s some way I can keep the same amazing, cross-platform outlining experience that I get with OO, but that better integrates with the other tools used by people that I work with. And as we emerge into the era of AI and agents, OO feels increasingly isolated and potentially left behind. Markdown is rapidly becoming the lingua-franca of agents and skills.
@kcase and the rest of the Omni gang, may I ask, what would need to be true before you’d relent and put something related to markdown on the backlog? I can tell you that there’s a lot of other things you’ve put effort into that I value far less than this.
What can the user community do to convince you of the importance of markdown?
