Markdown is a brilliant invention. It’s insane how good it is. In fact, it almost feels to me like Markdown wanted to be everything that Microsoft Word ISN’T.

I recommend Markdown to everyone. You wanna write a paper? DO IT IN MARKDOWN.

You need a shopping list? MARKDOWN THAT BAD BOY.

Gonna take out a personal ad in the paper? WE’RE NOT IN THE 90’S. Y2K DIDN’T HAPPEN. COME OUT OF THE BUNKER AND JOIN THE REST OF US.

I think you get the point. Markdown is basically a specialized syntax language for people who want to create beautiful text documents without all the hassle of a GUI. I ran into a problem a couple weeks ago where I was asked to write a code guide at work for one of our in-house libraries.

“I’ll just open up Microsoft Word”

Boy, what an idiot I was. Microsoft Word. For a getting started code guide, That’s ridiculous. You can’t put CODE into Microsoft word without it looking like a three-year-old had a rhythm sesh on your tab key. I ran into this problem almost immediately, spent about twenty minutes hunkering down on Word as if I was going to escape some hellish first steps and have it be smooth sailing from there, and then thought about Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow lets me write code.

Stack Overflow lets me make inline references to code.

Stack Overflow has an easy way to create headers, lists, and paragraph text.

Stack Overflow is a cool guy.

Stack Overflow was my best friend in high school and then started hating theatre so S.O. just stopped hanging out with me.

Stack Overflow uses MARKDOWN.

Now I didn’t think of all of those points. Well at least, in that order. The most important thing I remembered was the ease at which I could post answers on Stack Overflow.

Markdown was the answer. So I wrote a code guide using it. It was awesome! Not only were headings and other common document elements easy and painless to write, the end result was gorgeous. It’s almost unfair how much I felt I was leveraging Markdown to make my document look good, but it’s kind of amazing how, given the same input, Markdown can spit out a variety of outputs to fit your styling needs!

Markdown allowed me to:

1. Create headings (Using #, ##, ### (depending on level of heading))

2. Create lists (using # or 1.)

3. Create paragraph text (just by typing like a normal human)

4. Create inline code chunks (using backticks ``)

5. Create large chunks of syntax code (by indenting the code by four spaces)

6. Create Horizontal rules (using –)

Those six pillars are what allowed me to create a beautiful, take-your-first-steps tutorial. What’s better is that Markdown supports HTML (when it’s not throttled by a service like Stack Overflow). So I could add a table of contents, inline images, and links to other resources on the web.

Seriously. You should try Markdown. It’s brilliant. My current blogging workflow includes typing chunks of text into Sublime Text and fixing them in the WordPress editor but that should change fairly soon.

I recommend you try Markdown sometime! Look up the Syntax and then check out your results in some online tool like Dillinger!

Happy MARKING DOWNING.