I started using Markdown heavily for my personal use recently. Be it taking notes or brainstorming ideas. It has changed the way I document everything. I think developers can greatly benefit from its adoption. This post was also written in markdown editor.
What is markdown?
- Markdown provides semantic meaning for content in a simple way. Its doesn’t have a huge learning curve and can take couple of hours to do initial practice. Plenty of online editors are available for you to practice.
- Markdown is a standard format which makes it portable and compatible with wide range of online platforms, editors and viewers.
- Readable: Its easily readable in both, edit and read mode making it consumable even without a viewer.
- It’s smart. Markdown can support some special formatting and embedding capabilities to enhance its purpose. With
frontmatter and other embedding features you can do lot more beyond basic documenting.
- Markdown can be looked as an enhanced version of WYSIWYG editors.
Why you should know Markdown?
- Markdown is widely adopted in developer community. Most online platforms(at least software related) support markdown for creating posts, commenting, and more. Even WhatsApp supports some of markdown syntax like bold, list, italic etc.
- Modern web frameworks like Next, Astro and others have great support for markdown. You can create your own blog by editing just markdown files. Markdown provides all the formatting options to get you started with writing.
- It can help you document your thoughts in structured and easy to understand way for others. Use it for brainstorming ideas, just taking meeting notes or writing documentations for our amazing product. It can do it all.
- For those seeking even greater flexibility, MDX offers a compelling solution by allowing the integration of JSX into Markdown
It is really easy to get started, but you might be discouraged initially as we are not used to it. Just go with it for a week everyday and you will feel it easy and natural to use.
Link: Markdown Guide