What is Markdown?

Markdown is a simple formatting syntax used in plain text files. Word processors, such as Microsoft Word and Apple Pages, use rich text files, and contain information on how to render the text visually, such as whether the text should be bold or italic, what size the text should be, etc. Plain text does not have any fancy visual rendering of the text. Markdown provides a way of applying visual formatting to the otherwise plain, boring text.

Markdown is often compiled to HTML in order to be displayed on web pages. It's also growing in popularity in note taking tools as it makes it much faster to write formatted text (Obsidian, Notion, and Things 3 are all apps I use that support Markdown). These apps will often render the formatted text on the fly, so you can see what it would look like if you were using a standard word processor.

Markdown Cheat Sheet

Here's some of the most commonly used Markdown formatting:

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
#### Heading 4
##### Heading 5
###### Heading 6

- Bullet List
- Item 1
- Item 2

1. Numbered List
2. Item 1
3. Item 2

**Bold Text**
*Italic Text*
==Highlighted Text==
~~Strikethrough Text~~

[Link](https://somedomain.com)

> Blockquote
> Second line of blockquote