# Add option to "Paste as Markdown"
**URL:** https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643
**Category:** Feature Requests
**Created:** [January 16, 2025, 7:03pm UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643 "2025-01-16T19:03:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@hbowie](https://discourse.notenik.app/u/hbowie)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2025, 7:03pm UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643/1 "2025-01-16T19:03:38Z")
Hey, a user named Peter Abbasi has made a feature request on GitHub, and I wanted to see if others in this community (perhaps to include Peter at some point…?) have thoughts on this.
Here is the full text of his request:
> One feature I do sometimes miss from other applications is the option to paste the text currently in the clipboard formatted as Markdown (where possible, i.e., when html or rich-text has been copied). This has proven immensely useful saving so much time reapplying formatting to, for example, an article copied from the web.
I have thoughts and questions about this:
- What are the other apps that provide this, and how do they work?
- Are there utilities that provide such functions more generally, that could be used in conjunction with Notenik (so that Notenik itself does not have to do this)?
- Do we really need to support conversion from HTML, or is rich text sufficient? I ask this because, if I copy and paste the contents of a rendered web page (as opposed to its source code), it seems to come through as rich text in any case.
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### Author:  [@learg12](https://discourse.notenik.app/u/learg12)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2025, 8:09pm UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643/2 "2025-01-16T20:09:06Z")
Hey Herb! I’m very much a newbie on this, and not an expert, but there are text utility apps abound for Mac and one of them might be able to serve as a stand-in to copy-as and paste-as markdown.
If I were to research this, I’d be looking in a few of these places
> **[Markdown | thriftmac: 100% free Mac apps](https://www.thriftmac.com/category/markdown/)**
>
> Certified 100% free Mac apps
> **[Text Tools | thriftmac: 100% free Mac apps](https://www.thriftmac.com/category/text-tools/)**
>
> Certified 100% free Mac apps
it seems that [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/index.html) might be able to convert to markdown, accessible through homebrew on terminal, and lastly there might be some apple shortcuts (yuck) that can convert to it.
Lastly, this guy! [Markdown Service Tools - BrettTerpstra.com](https://brettterpstra.com/projects/markdown-service-tools/)
Other note taking apps that might be able to do this are Upnote and ConniePad, not sure.
This is me just riffing, I don’t actually know the answers. But for your last bullet point, I’m fine with markdown without html - I don’t use Notenik as a link saver or aggregator, I use Zotero and Goodlinks for read-it-later type things.
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### Author:  [@ThePrinter](https://discourse.notenik.app/u/ThePrinter)
#### Post date: [January 16, 2025, 8:54pm UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643/3 "2025-01-16T20:54:29Z")
I vaguely recall Herb gently emphasizing somewhere that he didn’t intend for Notenik to be a dedicated “markdown editor” a la iA Writer or something else. Is it possible that Peter can use the other applications he referred to as an external editor?
Also, leveraging @learg12’s pandoc recommendation, if Peter has the experience he could write a script that processes links through pandoc and outputs them into his Notenik collection.
* * *
As an aside, I’ve always wanted to request to be able to access command line programs in Notenik Script files, but felt like I may be asking for a lot. Think something like `browse open url` but a terminal command in the user’s shell `$PATH`.
I speculate that one could run external commands against any note(s) in this way, selecting the relevant script from the Scripter Window and/or by adding an option to share a note using a Script to the Share a Note window.
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### Author:  [@hbowie](https://discourse.notenik.app/u/hbowie)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2025, 1:15am UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643/4 "2025-01-18T01:15:57Z")
See the [latest beta](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/notenik-16-2-1-available-for-beta-testing-on-january-17th-2025/647) for an initial attempt to address this request.
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### Author:  [@hbowie](https://discourse.notenik.app/u/hbowie)
#### Post date: [January 21, 2025, 6:48pm UTC](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/add-option-to-paste-as-markdown/643/5 "2025-01-21T18:48:28Z")
And now see the [even later beta](https://discourse.notenik.app/t/notenik-16-2-3-available-for-beta-testing-on-january-21st-2025/650) and let me know how this works!