Search for Markdown guide or Markdown cheatsheet, and you’ll be rewarded with many sites that can help teach you. This isn’t a lesson on using Markdown, as there are far better instructional sites to do that. Markdown is portable across platforms and all Markdown interpreters, and even if Markdown itself goes out of favor, it’s still human-readable. Using proprietary tools like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages creates text files that aren’t portable to other tools, and can cause problems sharing across platforms. That sounds like a bold statement, but since it’s a plain-text format the statement is accurate. While Markdown might seem like a fad, and its fans are sometimes almost cultish in their adoration, Markdown itself is something to consider because it’s future-proof. I’m crazy about the messaging app Telegram, and I use Markdown in it all the time to format what I’m writing. One great place to experiment with Markdown is in our Slack ( /slack), because Slack also has Markdown support. Markdown can do some really complex things like creating tables in a super-easy way, but you don’t have to exercise all of the features of this little language to still get some benefits from it.

You may want to make a comment on a blog or fill out a description in an online form and you can use Markdown to format your text as bold, underlined, or italics, and to add bulleted and numbered lists. Because Markdown is so popular amongst nerds, they’ve built Markdown support into lots of tools you use every day. You might be thinking this isn’t interesting to you because you don’t write a blog, but there are reasons to learn a smidge of Markdown even for normal people. Markdown is a plain-text format that simplifies writing for the web and is easier to read than HTML. I don’t know if you’ve gotten onto the Markdown train yet, but I’ve been enjoying it more and more over the years since Bart first started nagging me to use it. Editor and Preview Pane Showing Formatting in MacDown

Macdown how to use