One of the most important things I’ve learned in my 40 years on Earth is Markdown. Now, I know that seems like a big thing to say, and it is. But I really do think that it’s true. I use this every single day. Now I do a ton of writing and all the stuff I do for work is written in Markdown, so maybe I’m just biased.

But for everyday people, I think some knowledge of Markdown is very important. First, it is used or at least available everywhere. Even if all you ever do is go onto Discord and type:

# I'M RIGHT and YOU'RE WRONG!

I’M RIGHT and YOU’RE WRONG!

Yes, you can shout at people on Discord in gigantic letters. Will drive your average Discord mod batty, so do so at your own risk, but Discord accepts a lot of Markdown (not sure about how well it works in their mobile app).

Another application is that if you ever want to share a bit of code, you can do this in Markdown and even get syntax highlighting for a bunch of different languages. Here’s what that would look like for some bash:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "hello world!"

That is done with just ```bash at the beginning and three more ticks at the end. You can do this for a ton of languages. It makes your stuff stand out.

Markdown also makes notes easier. Most note taking applications accept Markdown input, so you can format your notes without always going back to the format bar. You can bold things, add italics, strike things out, and so much more.

By knowing just a few little things, you can save yourself loads of time, and do many cool things.

For me, this means I can write in the same way no matter what editor I’m in. And my files will always output the same because they’re just Markdown.

So, yes, WYSIWYG is a good way to edit things, but Markdown is better. It’s more portable, has more features, and doesn’t rely on anything other than your knowledge of it.

You can find resources to learn Markdown here