The Lowdown on Markdown - Revisited

Markdown is one of my favorite languages that really isn't even a language at all.

I not longer utilize WYSIWYG editors after learning markdown and I'm perfectly okay with that :)

Why learn markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight solution to formatting content that gets generated to HTML. Any web page in existence is created with HTML in the end. If you need to author a blog post, a page full of content, a book, or even documentation you can do it all with markdown.

What's even better is that there are no autoformatting issues that some applications try to "make your life easier" with. In this video, I mentioned how Microsoft Word does a terrible job of copying and pasting text. If the text has any formatting whatsoever, Word tries its hardest to maintain that formatting. This feature alone makes me cringe.

Is Word all that bad? Not at all, but it is bloated with features, many of which I'll never utilize. Rather than work around those problems I sought to learn markdown to author content in the simplest way I could.

Markdown can be written using any type of application. Ideally, a markdown editor is a good choice to author inside simply because many editors offer syntax highlighting as well as a preview of the content in real-time.

Key Benefits:

• Lean language - There's little to learn and it's quick to pick up
• Many FREE markdown editors to choose from
• If you build, design, and or utilize websites markdown has a place in your arsenal.
• Version control depends on Markdown for documentation. If you've ever visited a Github repo of some sort and read about it, you can thank markdown for that extra information as well as the author.

Markdown Editors I Recommend

• Typora - My favorite editor by far. It auto-formats your markdown in place rather than rendering the markdown to a whole new view. The themes are decent. I prefer the newsprint theme as a serif font is easier to read in long-form. Definitely check it own if you haven't.
• Caret - This literally just launch as I'm writing this article. So far I'm a fan. The darker theme is great and a notable feature I like over typora is the File manager. You can browse folders and create, move, edit, or delete files within the interface. Just press command + T
• Whiskey - I used this for a long time before discovering Typora. It has some quirks but overall it's a straight forward markdown editor. I believe the project has been abandoned but I'm not 100% of that theory.
• Dillinger - When I write content it's typically always offline. That chance of something not syncing and/or updating within a browser has kept me from ever writing there. However, if I'm on the go and I need to draft up something quick, Dillinger is my tool to do so.

The Lowdown on Markdown Resource

As I stated in the video, I created a free resource to help you learn markdown. There are a number of tutorials and guides out there to do the same but I simply wanted to contribute to that number. You can find the resource below:

The Lowdown on Markdown