Markdown - an easy markup language

Sadat Jubayer

Sadat Jubayer

April 10, 2021

• 2 min read

What is markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor.

It's like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) with some sugar. Using markdown, you can control the view of your document by formatting it, like -

  • Format text as heading, bold, italic, blockquotes, etc.
  • Insert links, images, tables, lists, code blocks, etc.

The extension of a markdown file is .md or .markdown

Headings

To format text as a heading, you have to use the # symbol. There are six types of heading in markdown.

# This is heading one
 
## This is heading two
 
### This is heading three
 
#### This is heading four
 
##### This is heading five
 
###### This is heading six

The output of this -

Markdown Output

Text formatting

Formatting text is effortless in markdown. There are multiple steps to format text.

**This is bold text**
**This is bold text**
 
_This is Italic Text_
_This is Italic Text_
 
_This is **bold** and italic combined_
 
> This is a blockquote

The output of this -

Markdown Output

Working with lists

Unordered and Ordered lists both have support on markdown. A list can contain nested lists also.

Unordered List
 
- Item 1
- Item 2
  - Item 2a
  - Item 2b
 
Ordered List
 
1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3
   - Item 3a
   - Item 3b

The output of this -

Markdown Output

Link and Image

![GitHub Logo](https://images.unsplash.com/..)

[SadatJubayer](http://smjubayer.me)

The output of this -

Markdown Output

Codeblocks

To write a code in markdown, you need three carets (_) in the starting and three carets (_) in the end. You can write the language specifier after the first carets to get syntax highlighting of that language.

```javascript
function sayHello() {
  console.log('Hello from Sadat Jubayer!');
}
```

The output of this -

Markdown Output

Resources

This article covers the basics of Markdown. I hope this will help you write markdown files quickly.