Why does Google not (want to?) support the full Markdown experience in Google Drive? I'm not talking about the limited, mostly useless support in Docs, but supporting opening, reading / editing real (.MD extension) files. Just, why?
Simple: if you make your documents in Markdown, you won't be making them in Google Docs. Stuff made in Google Docs is sticky, increases your dependence on Google, and importantly has a valuable network effect due to their collaboration features. It is in Google's best interest to encourage you to rely on their proprietary services instead of offering you alternatives that allow you to switch provider easily.<p>Additionally, the "people who know what Markdown is but also like trusting Google with their files" demographic is vanishingly small and not who Drive is targeting at all.
They have a whole app store for Google Drive. There are markdown editors in there as well as plenty of other niche things. <a href="https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2500820" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2500820</a>
Why should they? For your use-case, and mine, sure by all means add it. For the average user: "Why is Google Drive showing my text big a bigger font when I start a line with #"<p>There's zero benefit for them to add it, and the majority of people who want markdown probably aren't using Google Drive to render their documents.
Even in 2021, Google Workspace had more than 3 billion users. I believe that 99% of these individuals had no clue what Markdown was. If they had, perhaps third-party apps that can connect to Google Drive, such as StackEdit, would be much more popular now.
I’d frame it more as just text files…I can edit Word documents (as Word documents, not converted) that are stored on Google Drive, in Google Docs. One that feature was added, support for plain text should have been added as well.<p>That being said Google Doc’s support for Word documents is confusing as hell. I wish at least it was made to be more visually distinct since people (such as: me) get confused all the time between editing a Google Doc, a Word document converted to Google Docs (where now there are likely two branched versions of the same document), and just using the Google Docs interface to edit a Word document directly.
I presume you're looking to add a .md file and have editor / docs support, but there is this in case anyone is looking to write a limited subset of markdown in a Google doc:<p><a href="https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036?hl=en</a><p>It's not great, but you'll find it useful if you have the muscle memory of `* thing` for bullet lists and `## My section` for headings.
A lot of people making strategic arguments like “it’s for lock-in”. I don’t buy it; they ship features so slowly that even obvious basic product features to copy from Notion like infinite-scrolling pages only shipped last year IIRC.<p>They have a huge backlog of features that are catch-up to a strategically threatening disruptive competitor, and they can’t deliver those. Markdown support is below all that in priority.
Why store markdown files in <i>Google Drive</i> of all places and not a git repository?<p>Google Drive, to me, is object storage with a consumer-friendly user interface. It does not sound like the right place for constantly-changing text files for which you'd want revision history and commit-oriented editing.
Google Drive is a perfect example of today's Google. "Good enough -- just barely".<p>It <i>could</i> be a very fast, efficient file browser with lots of format previews. It's not.<p>Doing basic "file manager" things such as viewing/extracting files from a .zip, editing a plain-text file, or viewing markdown… all those are just "too complicated" for a small indie company like Google.<p>Drive is incredibly powerful, and yet it's just awful compared to what it could be. If someone one day makes a "better web UI" for Drive with better functionality, but that still uses google drive in the backend, damn I want in.
It's definitely a workaround, but I use a Chrome extension to work around this a bit. I use "Markdown Here" to add a "turn Markdown text into rich formatted text" button to my Chrome bar:<p><a href="https://markdown-here.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://markdown-here.com/</a><p>And then I use it on plain Markdown text in a GMail compose window. The rich formatted output it produces is useful for sending richly-formatted GMail messages, but it can also be copy-pasted into a Google Doc (e.g. via <a href="https://docs.new" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.new</a>), and it comes out really nicely, including support for headers, sub-headers, links, code blocks, and the rest. The main issue is that this is a one-way process, but so long as you keep the .md source files somewhere else, this trick lets you share a richly-formatted doc with others for final commenting/editing/etc. in the GDocs interface.
They've marginalized "the offering" as a hybrid office/consumer product with a fragmented vision, as shown by their uninspired rebranding/marketing efforts.<p>Google Cloud could just create their project folders in drive, let drive open the code editors, and let you do all your coding from there, but that team knows how bad the UI is, and this team is excused because they're the "office/consumer" offering. Both are paid to make separate UX, neither trusts the other, and it's categorical, so not even a conflict. Except, then there's the user that is forced to be incompatible members of two categories when they're not.<p>In an ideal googleverse, you'd login to chrome and it'd have everything. It would be one service, metered by resource consumption, and you'd never have to leave any single window opened for a purpose, to get that "computational" thing done.
My guess is that the engineering required to turn Markdown into Docs/Sheets/Slides files is more expensive than the increased engagement that Google would get from doing this.
Not sure about other platforms, but on macOS, copy/paste includes style information. So I write my document in Markdown in my preferred editor, preview it with Marked 2, copy from Marked 2, paste into my Chrome window. Works except for images which cause the Chrome window to spin forever with "Document offline."
Even emacs has a markdown mode:<p><a href="https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/</a>
Well, why should they?<p>I find more critical that for all the dependecy on COM, the IDL editing experience in Visual Studio still sucks after about 30 years, and is basically like editing bare bones text files.
Maybe they’re planning to shutdown Google Drive as it is and focus more on the “Office suite” experience. More oriented towards business case, and MD is not a priority for this at all.
Markdown is a markup language. Google Docs is a WYSIWYG document editor. These are two fundamentally different approaches to the creation of written content.<p>This question is kind of like asking why you can't edit Illustrator projects in Photoshop.
I rented to a meth addict once upon a time.<p>After we finally evicted him, the house was strewn with several ambitious but abandoned projects.<p>Almost as bad as Google.