Reasons to Learn Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Reasons to Learn Markdown

readwriteweb.com

24 pointsjonmwords34 comments

Slightly tangential, but I recently started using Mou (http://mouapp.com/) and am totally hooked. Now, almost everything I write, I write in Markdown.

If you are looking for a Markdown editor for the Mac, check out Mou.

Disclaimer - I am in no way affiliated with the tool or it's developer. Just a happy user :)

I too use Mou and it's a great editor. I've contacted the developer a few times (http://chenluois.com/ - bugs and feature requests) and s/he's been very responsive and usually emailed back in a few hours.

Markdown Pro (www.markdownpro.com - 6 dollars) is another great markdown editor for mac that has more features.

Also worth checking out http://www.iawriter.com/

It isn't free, but its design is phenomenal.

Edit: Just noticed Mou won't be free after beta. Will be interesting to see how the prices compare.

iCloud integration between iPad and mac app makes iawriter pretty awesome for me.

Texts - a Markdown editor for Mac & Windows - http://www.textseditor.com/

I like that it's a true wysiwyg editor in that you actually edit rich text instead of typing the markdown syntax.

A web version of that would be awesome to integrate with apps.

I almost wish I could have some kind of vim plugin that would render markdown. I tried finding this for MacVim (which could be capable) but alas... :)

In any conversation about Markdown, I think it's appropriate to mention Textile [1] as well. Textile is fairly similar, intended to fulfill the same niche of markup with slightly different syntax. Personally, I prefer textile because I think it's a bit more expressive, though I'd rather be writing LaTeX...

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29

Textile is a different beast. Unprocessed Markdown is meant to be human consumable, not just human readable. Specifically, you should be able to send a raw Markdown file to someone who doesn't know what Markdown is, and it should still be pleasant to read for that person.

Textile uses easy to read syntax, but line prefixes like 'h1.' leak the HTML intentions to the reader. That's not to say textile doesn't have it's uses though. Textile solves problems that Markdown doesn't even address, even in its extended forms. For example, Textile allows you to apply span tags (with class name) using Textile syntax. Markdown requires you to write actual HTML.

If you use vim as your primary Markdown editor, I'd suggest plasticboy's markdown plugin: https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown

I was using vim's default syntax highlighter for Markdown and ran into highlighting issues with unclosed single quotes.

Since a lot of Markdown files use .md instead of .markdown, I'd also suggest adding the file `~/.vim/ftplugin/modula2.vim` containing:

    setlocal filetype=mkd

Top reason for me: separation of presentation and content

Which, when actually practiced, is the biggest advantage raw HTML offers over anything WYSIWYG. Except with Markdown I don't even have to write out the HTML, and that practice of only caring about content (and addressing presentation later using styling rules) is naturally enforced by the beautifully limited syntax Markdown offers.

Users don't care about separation of presentation and content. They care about how easy it is to use.

True. But just because I am capable of using HTML doesn't preclude me from being a Markdown user too. A different kind of user, but a user nonetheless.

I think markdown could be the lingua franca of publishers. HTML would be the best, but it's a bit to specialized. Where as markdown walks the line of being specialized yet easy enough to learn that it won't scare away brand new users. I mean markdown can interpret plain text into something useful. If enough non-technical sites adopted markdown, front and center, it could spread widely.

We've found that it works quite well for us on Leanpub, and you're right that the learning curve doesn't seem to be too steep for new writers.

We need to be a bit better at this, but starting off with saying

"# Chapter" makes a new chapter

"## Section" starts a new section

this is italic and this is bold.

[this is a link](http://example.com)

gets you 90% of what you need to write a book, and the other 10% is not much harder.

I dislike the fact that in order insert a code block I have to smash my space bar 4 times for each line.

Then don't do that.

Edit your code block over at the left margin as you would normally edit any code. Then do a block insert of 4 spaces down the left side of your code block. That's how I do it.

    line of code
    line of code
        indented line of code
    line of code

In vim, after editing your code like you usually would:

    Go to the front of the top line,
    Ctrl-V to enter visual block mode (Ctrl-Q on windows),
    jjj to the bottom line,
    I (capital I) to insert at the front,
    space space space space,
    escape.

I did exactly that to create the above two blocks.

in vim, you can also use ">>" command which indents a line. if you use python, your vim is probably already set up to indent four spaces, so the above can be done with "4>>" (=indent next four lines)

One of the few times I find myself in visual mode is when I'm indenting lines. v{motion}>> or <<. Super useful.

    Capital V
    jjjjj
    >

6>>

Off the top of my head I'm not sure if this is part of Markdown proper (or maybe GitHub's "flavor") but you can do fenced code blocks, like so:

~~~

// your code // goes here // and here

~~~

That's GitHub flavor. You can also use back ticks and specify syntax highlighting, e.g:

    ```python

    from functools import partial

    def foo(a,b,i):
        if i >= a and i <= b:
            return i**2
        else:
            return 0

    print reduce(lambda x,y: x+y,map(partial(foo,3,7),xrange(1,10)))
    ```

You can also just press tab.

That doesn't work well in browsers (especially for blogs)

True. I usually write in an app first (either nvALT or Byword) and then copy and paste online.

I just discovered "Nocs"[1] for the iPad/iPhone, very nice markdown editor with drop box support. It's free and seems to work better than some of the stuff I've paid for.

[1] http://www.wisd.com/nocs/

Nothing beats Org (http://orgmode.org) for me. But sadly outside of Emacs (and Vim) it's virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

For the love of {whatever}, please stop using markdown or any other text to html markup. When you use it a lot yourself, you think it's no big deal. And you begin to think your users will understand it easily.

37signals used to do this with Basecamp. I would bet $100 that if they asked their customers, their customers would overwhelmingly say that they prefer the WYSIWYG editor that is now in Basecamp instead of the old way.

Make things easier for your users. Repeat.

I'm going to have to disagree. Markdown is used on StackOverflow, GitHub, Reddit.

While StackOverflow and GitHub users may be tech-savvy, Reddit has a lot of casual users. Markdown is not difficult to pick up, it merely codifies how people type anyway.

Other advantages of using Markdown locally is to separate data from content, legibility, and standard support. Using Pandoc, you can convert Markdown files into HTML, PDF, manpages, etc.

Just because a few tech sites use it doesn't make it user friendly.

This is a tech community so almost everyone here is likely comfortable with learning new things. The rest of the world isn't like that.

Most people don't like learning new things, particularly if it's not going to really make a difference in their lives in a dramatic way. They are familiar with Word or Gmail.

Think of it this way: let's say bought a new car tomorrow. With this new car, instead just sticking in the gas nossel and filling gas, you had to say a few magic words, stick the nossel in, fill gas and then say a few magic words.

The magic words might be simple and even make sense. Like "adding gas" and "done adding gas". But they are just extra steps. Moving parts. Things that could go wrong. Easily.

I'm saying this primarily because I've used markdown in the past and almost always without fail, I get emails and phone calls about how something isn't working the way it should be and invariably it's one character off from what they intended.

Basecamp uses textile, not markdown. I don't know of an option to switch it. I would be thrilled if it in fact used markdown -- I find it much quicker to write.

For this particular customer, maybe the WYSwhatever is a little easier, but not substantially - I personally prefer the old Basecamp overall.

In the short term I suppose you might not want to use markdown. But, in the log run markdown would be better then most wyswigs, and if you have a population of users who are sufficiently technical, or need to do something more intricate then a couple paragraphs markdown really is the way to go.

It takes less time to "learn" markdown than it does to read this blog post.

It takes more time to find + fix problems that your users will have and email your support team about than it taks to read the blog post.

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