Date: Feb 05, 2023
Author: Adeepa Gunathilake

Markdown is the simplest text markup language other than gemini. I would not be incorrect if I say markdown will only be second to gemtext and plain .txt text files in terms of simplicity. Unfortunately, there are more people who don’t even know what markdown is than the people who know.

Jump directly to markdown cheatsheet

If you want to take some notes during a lecture or during a presentation etc, your note will mostly be plain text. Sometimes it may contain rich elements like graphs, columned layouts etc. but those occasions are rare.

I’ve seen people using softwares like MS Word to take simple notes. While that’s the most accessible way for most computer users, it’s not the most efficient way due to several reasons. I list some of them below.

• Word files (.docx) are complex file types.
• Word editing software are usually heavy and more resource intensive.
• Because file formats like .docx or .odt are complex, those files will not be readable without the niche software like MS Word or LibreOffice Writer.

Because most of your notes are just plain text, you can use the plain old .txt text file format to save them. Because of how lightweight text file format is, it’s very efficient to take notes in .txt format. You can use the old windows notepad or a little more advanced tool like notepad++ to take plain text notes.

But what if you need add little more formatting to your documents such as bold text, images and headings? MS Word is still not an answer because there’s a solution which let you use all the formattings without compromising efficiency.

That solution is MARKDOWN!!!

The markdown file format

Markdown files are just like plain old .txt files but the file extension needs to be .md instead of .txt. Markdown is dead simple, I’ll show you an example which will make you understand markdown immediately.

This is an example file called markdown-note.md.

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# This is a level one heading

This is a paragraph. The above thing is a level one heading. 
You can use upto 6 levels of heading. This is still the first
paragraph. A paragraph ends with an empty line.

This is the second paragraph. You can have as many paragraphs
as you want like this. Btw, here's a level 2 heading.

## This is a level 2 heading

You can have **bold** text like **this** and *italic* text 
like *this*. Here's how to put a list.

* list item 1
* list item 2

You can also use - to have list, like follows.

- list item 1
- list item 2 

And btw, numbered lists are like this.

1. item 1
1. item 2
1. item 3

Or preferably,

1. item 1
2. item 2
3. item 3

`inline code` with backticks, and code blocks with 3 backticks.

Links like this [Link name](https://example.com). Images like this.

![Image alt text](https://example.com/image.png)

> This is how you insert blockquotes
> You just have to start the line with
> a less than (>) sign.

As you can see, markdown format is dead simple. You don’t need special software to read a .md file. You can just use the plain old notepad or notepad++, but because it’s markdown, we can use markdown previewer software to see a properly formatted output.

1. Marktext
2. Visual studio code

To download marktext, visit marktext github release page here and download the marktext-setup.exe file for windows or marktext-arm64.dmg for mac.

Visual studio code is the ultra powerful option. To preview a markdown file in VS Code, press ctrl+shit+v while opening the markdown file. Download VS code here.

If you find this article useful, you are free to share, but more than that, I invite you to look more about this if you feel like this article is not enough. Here’s a good starting point other than google.com.