Markdown - an easy markup language

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.

headings.md

# 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 -

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 -

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 -

Link and Image

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

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

The output of this -

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 -

Resources

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