Markdown is a way to format and structure plain text
When you're creating a document with your favourite office suite, it often gives you tools to make parts of your text bold, italicised, or do things like create headings or lists. This is very convenient when writing long articles when you want to create structure or emphasis.
Sometimes we have to write into our web browser or simple text editors. These software rarely give us fancy formatting tools. However some may support Markdown as an alternative. Markdown describes a set of conventions in writing that can allow people and software to easily understand its structure.
Let's learn Markdown by example
The easiest way to learn Markdown is to see it in use. We'll see some example Markdown code, followed by the Markup that it produces.
This is a paragraph of text.
By separating this line from the above with an empty line, I tell Markdown that this will be a different paragraph.
This is a paragraph of text.
By separating this line from the above with an empty line, I tell Markdown that this will be a different paragraph.
# Main heading
## Sub-heading
### Sub-sub-heading
Sub-heading
Sub-sub-heading
We can _lightly emphasise_ words or **strongly emphasise** them.
We can lightly emphasise words or strongly emphasise them.
[This text](https://thinkmoult.com/) links to https://thinkmoult.com.
This text links to https://thinkmoult.com.
We can easily create bulleted lists, as shown below:
* List item one
* List item two
* List item three
We can easily create bulleted lists, as shown below:
- List item one
- List item two
- List item three
We can also easily create numbered lists, as shown below:
1. List item one
2. List item two
3. List item three
We can also easily create numbered lists, as shown below:
- List item one
- List item two
- List item three
We can use backticks to mention `code` within a sentence, or prefix an entire paragraph with an angle bracket to quote it verbatim.
> For example, this paragraph is quoted as-is.
We can use backticks to mention code within a sentence, or prefix an entire paragraph with four spaces to quote it verbatim.
For example, this paragraph is quoted as-is.
There's more than one way to format Markdown
Markdown is a very relaxed convention. Although our examples above showed some ways of using Markdown, these aren't the only way. For example, you can emphasize text using _this method_ as we showed above, or you can also use a single asterisk, *like so*. For the full set of examples of how Markdown can be used, we recommend visiting Markdown: Basics.
Why is Markdown so great?
Markdown is simple, quick to learn, and understood intuitively by humans and computers. By being "simple by design", it prevents maintenance nightmares and makes editing fun again!