Thanks for a great thread. I’ve been using interstitial journaling and markdown for a couple of years, off and on. It really stuck when I used Logseq, but instability with that application led me to Obsdian which I have gradually tailored.
I have a QuickAdd macro which pops up a box, asks me to pick a project, and logs my entry along with the current time at the bottom of my daily note, regardless of which note I’m currently in. Optionally it makes it a task.
It means there’s good flow without having to think where to put information. A typical entry might be:
- 20:34 [[Project A]] Just off the phone to [[@bobsmith]] who is sending over the main files tomorrow.
I can go to either the Project A page or Bob Smith’s page and see any thoughts/ tasks/ notes I’ve recorded against them. I have pages set up for ideas and future meetings too so I can record things for them as they pop into my head. And sometimes I just record random thoughts in the daily note that don’t belong anywhere, just to get them out of my brain!
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You may know this (I think I mentioned it above) but the Daily Notes editor displays them in Obsidian similarly to Logseq’s journal view.
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Sorry, I was a software engineer for a long time. COBOL, Java, Visual Basic, DOS batch, Unix shell, raw tape or disk files of all types, and any other code files are all or often plain text (ASCII and even EBCDIC in the old days). I use a variety of apps and utilities to look at such files. And even binary files can get opened in BBEdit if I’m having a problem which calls for insight from a different angle. It’s what I’m used to.
From this perspective, Markdown puts a very light touch on a file and is simply not all that special. 
Didn’t the Java files have a .java extension to distinguish them from the C files with a .c extension? Both are the same plain text files, but you wouldn’t want to use a .txt extension for those files.
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And Espanso wouldn’t recognize my yaml config files if I changed the extension to .txt even though they’re text files, just as some markdown apps like Obsidian won’t recognize files with a .txt extension as markdown files.
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You still haven’t explained why you think it’s better for iA Writer to default to the .txt rather than the .md extension.
It makes sense for an app like BBEdit to default to .txt because it’s a general purpose text editor. But iA Writer is a specialized markdown editor.
Defaulting to the .md extension makes markdown files more seamlessly interoperable with other markdown apps, and in a file manager makes it easier to tell which files contain markdown syntax.
The fact that markdown is just plaintext with strategically placed hashes, asterisks, etc. doesn’t change that.
The .txt extension is a very generic label, and from what I’ve seen often indicates that the file contains nothing but plain plain text, with no syntax at all.
Not actually answering your question, but IA Writer (on the ipad at least) allows for setting a default file extension.
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Yes, but it defaults to .txt, and imo ought to default to .md so users new to markdown who don’t know any better don’t end up with a thousand files they have to go back to change the extension on to use them in another markdown app.
There would literally be no downside to changing the default extension to .md like nearly all modern markdown editors.
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