Tired of plain text documents that lack pizzazz?
Welcome to the world of Markdown, the lightweight markup language that empowers you to create visually appealing and engaging content with ease.
Whether you’re a seasoned programmer, a budding blogger or simply someone who wants to elevate their writing game Markdown has got you covered.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve deep into the fascinating world of Markdown equipping you with the knowledge and skills to craft stunning documents that captivate your audience.
So buckle up and get ready to embark on a journey of creative expression with Markdown!
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a user-friendly markup language that allows you to format text using plain text syntax. It’s like a secret code that transforms your words into beautifully formatted documents, without the need for complex software or coding knowledge.
Think of it as a bridge between plain text and rich text editors, offering the best of both worlds. You get the simplicity and flexibility of plain text, combined with the formatting capabilities of a rich text editor
Here’s why you should embrace Markdown:
- Simple and intuitive: Markdown’s syntax is easy to learn and remember, making it accessible to everyone.
- Lightweight and portable: Markdown files are plain text files, meaning they’re small in size and can be easily shared across different platforms.
- Versatile and flexible: Markdown can be used for a wide range of purposes, from writing blog posts and articles to creating documentation and presentations.
- Improved collaboration: Markdown’s plain text format makes it easier for multiple people to collaborate on documents without worrying about formatting inconsistencies.
- Enhanced readability: Markdown-formatted documents are easier to read and navigate, thanks to their clear structure and formatting.
Getting Started with Markdown
Are you ready to start using Markdown? Here’s what you need to know:
1. Markdown Editors:
There are numerous Markdown editors available, both online and offline. Some popular options include:
- Online Editors: StackEdit, HackMD, Dillinger
- Offline Editors: Typora, Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text
2. Markdown Syntax:
Markdown uses a simple set of symbols to format text. Here are some of the most common Markdown syntax elements:
- Headings: Use # symbols to create headings of different levels (e.g., # Heading 1, ## Heading 2).
- Bold and Italics: Use double asterisks for bold text and single asterisks for italics.
- Lists: Create ordered and unordered lists using hyphens (-) or asterisks (*).
- Links: Use square brackets [] for the link text and parentheses () for the URL.
- Images: Use an exclamation mark (!) followed by square brackets [] for the image description and parentheses () for the image URL.
- Code Blocks: Use three backticks (“`) to create code blocks.
3. Resources and Tutorials:
There are countless resources available online to help you learn Markdown. Here are a few to get you started:
- Markdown Guide: https://www.markdownguide.org/
- Markdown Cheatsheet: https://www.markdownguide.org/cheat-sheet/
- Markdown Tutorial: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/markdown-tutorial/
Mastering Markdown: Leveling Up Your Skills
Once you’ve grasped the basics of Markdown, it’s time to take your skills to the next level. Here are some advanced techniques to explore:
- Tables: Create tables using pipes (|) and hyphens (-).
- Blockquotes: Use a greater-than symbol (>) to create blockquotes.
- Horizontal Rules: Use three hyphens (-), asterisks (*), or underscores (_) to create a horizontal rule.
- Comments: Use HTML-style comments (<!– –>) to add comments that won’t be rendered in the final output.
- Escape Characters: Use a backslash () to escape special characters.
Markdown in Action: Real-World Applications
Markdown’s versatility makes it a valuable tool in various domains. Here are a few examples of how Markdown is used in the real world:
- Technical Documentation: Markdown is widely used to create technical documentation, such as API documentation, user manuals, and README files.
- Blog Posts and Articles: Many bloggers and writers use Markdown to create their content, as it allows for easy formatting and publishing.
- Presentations: Markdown can be used to create presentations using tools like Remark.js.
- Email Newsletters: Markdown can be used to create visually appealing email newsletters.
- Social Media Posts: Some social media platforms, like Reddit, support Markdown formatting.
Markdown is a powerful tool that can transform your writing experience. Its simplicity, versatility, and ease of use make it an invaluable asset for anyone who wants to create engaging and well-formatted content.
So, embrace the power of Markdown and unleash your creativity!
A prologue, of sorts
I can’t remember when I first started to use plain text files for my notes and other writing. When I was 18, I had just bought a Mac Performa with the money I had earned from a part-time job. This would have been sometime after 1995.
(I was paying for that computer for years afterwards.)
That computer was an upgrade from my old Mac SE and in many ways, a major improvement:
- Colour! Thousands of them, even. So nice.
- Multi-tasking. Also great. I want to use more than one app at the same time.
- More storage.
- An option for a built-in modem. Hello, Internet!
But the software was a different story, and this is where Mac users today may recognize parts of the story. However, this time the fault wasn’t with Apple but with Microsoft.
My go-to application on the SE (commonly nicknamed the “kýrauga” in Icelandic, literally “porthole”) was Microsoft Word. Anything I typed I typed in Word. A small black and white screen, Word 5. 1, and a mechanical keyboard made for a surprisingly good writing environment.
With the upgrade came a transition to Word 6. 0, courtesy of ‘borrowed’ install disks from my mom’s office, and I was not happy.
The performance and UX disaster that was Word for Mac 6.0 is well-documented elsewhere. It’s a textbook case by now. This meant that I began to use Word less and less for personal writing and relied on it primarily for writing for school.
I’ve always written and have always used computers for writing. I began by usign WordPerfect for DOS when I was ten years old. Switched to Word on the SE. And when Word disappointed on the Performa I began to search for alternatives. I tried ClarisWorks for a while. Even tried Nisus Writer.
As you might guess, all this switching meant that file format compatibility became a bit of an issue. Since most of this was just notes and other personal writing, I finally chose plain text and BBEdit Lite. Since then, I’ve mostly stuck to plain text as my main format for taking digital notes. My use of plain text predates my use of markdown and other markup formats (including HTML).
For work, I’ve always just used what I had to: Word, Google Docs, Pages, whatever. But for myself? Plain text.
I had forgotten about all of this when I was preparing for the user research interviews I had set up for my Colophon Cards project.
The interviews were a follow-up to the survey I had conducted a few weeks earlier. I wanted some more context on the data from the survey and to get some feedback on the initial paper prototype of the main view (implemented in HTML, natch). I got around a dozen people volunteering for an interview, which I split into two cohorts:
- For the first part, I focused on the different types of note-taking they were doing: group work, solo work, personal, household, hobby, and so on. Followed by a short test of the initial paper prototype.
- With the second group, I tried to learn more about how the different ways that people took notes at the same time worked with each other. Were the paper notes ever turned into digital ones? Was there a way for the group work notes to flow into the individual work notes? This was followed by a quick test of a new version of the paper/HTML prototype.
It’s not the sort of study you do to get conclusive actionable data. Too few participants; too unstructured; a self-selected group of expert users.
That last part is an especially big issue for studies like these. Because people who are really interested in the subject are easier to get to participate, you end up with more expert users than would be typical of your actual user base. And that was certainly the case here.
These sorts of interviews can be a good source for leads and ideas, though. I view these results more as a starting point for further testing and research.
I wanted some context for some of the bigger questions I had after the survey. One of them was on formats and lock-in. Quite a few of the respondents looked like habitual app switchers and I wanted to find out why.
My motivation was quite self-serving:
- People who switch apps are more likely to try the new one.
- You can stop people from switching before they do if you know what makes them do it.
To markdown or not to markdown?
Since the beginning of this project—actually, since the beginning of my work at Rebus a few years ago—I’ve been thinking about whether the writing widgets in the apps I make should be based on markdown or rich text.
Markdown has a number of obvious flaws. It starts off simple for most users but its mid-level or advanced features are surprisingly hard to master. Many find it quite difficult, for example, to remember what kind of bracket to use and where. What comes first in a markdown link: the regular brackets or the square ones? I can’t remember how markup works for the life of me. I usually end up embedding an HTML element. I don’t even know where to start with markdown tables. And I’ve been blogging with markdown for almost two decades.
HTML markup tends to be clearer for many elements, easier to write and read, and less ambiguous. s, tables, and even links tend to be more straightforward in HTML.
It’s uglier, sure. HTML source code isn’t noted for its typographic aesthetics. But clarity and consistency go a long way.
A bigger issue is that HTML and markdown have drifted apart. Markdown doesn’t have a standard way to markup figure elements. The methods for generating an id attribute, important for cross-referencing, are also non-standard.
These problems don’t matter much if you’re just writing for yourself and don’t want to turn the text into HTML or PDF. This is when the main benefit of plaintext is that it is not proprietary; the features that markdown offers are just a nice bonus. In that case, it’s important to remember that non-expert users probably don’t even know what markdown is or what its features are. The risk is that a lot of people will find it impossible to learn markdown because it is so hard for them.
I’m not a fan of many of the current trends in rich text editing either.
Block-based editors generally started off utterly dysfunctional because they were, for the most part, flawed conceptually. (Any rich text editor that doesn’t let you select text across blocks is not fit for purpose. Getting rid of more and more of their unique traits has been the only way to “fix” most of them. Now, “block-based” is just a marketing term because most of these editors look the same as editors that aren’t block-based.
Today’s rich text editors also often use margin or command menu buttons that are so full that they make even the most complicated and crowded hamburger menu look as simple and clear as MacPaint’s menu in my old SE. Most of them are UX messes overloaded with features.
The minimalist rich text editors, on the other hand, tend to be too minimal. Either they depend on the hover state to show UI elements or they expect you to know markdown in order to use many of their formatting tools. The ones that don’t do either are usually pretty basic and only let you use basic inline formatting, a few heading levels, and embeds.
Rich text widgets are also notoriously hard to implement properly (usably and accessibly) on the web. They’re extremely easy to get wrong, esp. if you’re trying to roll your own. (Don’t do that. And if you use an old widget again, you usually pick up the garbage UX trend that was popular at the time that widget was made. Markdown, by contrast, just needs a text area. It can benefit from more but doesn’t require it.
Rich-text widgets also raise the spectre of interoperability. There’s a reason why people use plaintext: it works with everything and can be read in apps that don’t support markdown or other markup formats. You could save what a rich text editor gives you as HTML. Since HTML is also a markup language built on plain text, it has many of the same benefits for being able to work with other programs as markdown. But markdown has one clear advantage over HTML: most of the markup that defines blocks is either not visible or almost invisible. Paragraphs are defined by new lines. Lists are defined by looking like lists. Even headings are conceptually simple. Markdown is a great plain text format, but these block-level features make it even better if you had to use HTML for everything else.
If you’re only using HTML for interoperability, this might not be a problem. But if someone needs to change it by hand, it could be a problem.
You could use markdown as your editor’s interchange format, but then the different flavors of markdown and its drift from HTML would be a problem.
How to CRUSH THIS React Interview Question — Markdown App Tutorial
FAQ
What do you need to know about Markdown?
What is the coding style of Markdown?
What are the goals of Markdown?
What are the elements of Markdown?
Can I write my questions in Markdown?
To ease the import process we would like you to write your questions in markdown. This is a special format with no text formatting, that works well with our website and database. Ultimately the question is split into different sections, which I have annotated below:
What is a markdown file?
Markdown is a lightweight markup language. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages. And given below is a detailed explanation of its advantages and on using it. The extension for a Markdown file is .md or .markdown.
How do I use the Markdown preview?
When opening the markdown preview, automatically scroll to view the current selected line from the markdown editor. When changing the selection in the markdown editor, scrolls the markdown preview to reveal the corresponding element. When double clicking an element on the markdown preview page, opens an editor and reveals this line in the center.
