Markdown Editor

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004. Its primary goal was to be readable as plain text while still being convertible to HTML. Unlike HTML, Markdown uses punctuation characters you might already use in plain-text emails — asterisks for bold, underscores for italics, hashes for headings.

Today, Markdown is the dominant format for README files on GitHub, documentation in static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, and MkDocs, writing environments like Notion and Obsidian, and messaging platforms including Slack and Discord. GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) is the most widely used dialect, adding tables, task lists, and fenced code blocks to the base specification.

This editor uses the same Markdown-to-HTML conversion as most modern tools, so what you see in the preview is what you will get when your Markdown is rendered on GitHub or most documentation platforms.

Common mistakes

• Mixing tabs and spaces — Markdown is sensitive to indentation. Use spaces consistently for nested lists.
• Missing blank lines — A blank line is required between a paragraph and the next block element (heading, list, code block).
• Forgetting to escape special characters — Characters like *, _, `, [, ] have special meaning in Markdown. Escape with a backslash to use them literally.

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