The Joys of Markdown

OK, so I’m about 7 years late to the party on this one, but man oh man do I love Markdown.

I spend a lot of time dealing with text, but most of the time it’s text designed to be consumed by compilers and interpreters rather than people. When I write people-facing text, it’s almost always in LaTeX. In the process of dealing with these kinds of writing tasks, I’ve become really intolerant of WYSIWYG text editors. They’re just not precise enough.

Evernote’s a notorious culprit here. I tell it to bold a line, it bolds the next blank line too. I change the font, it gets changed back in weird places. Bulleted lists sometimes re-bullet or re-indent themselves in weird ways. It’s irritating. I’ve had similar problems with WordPress’ visual editor.

In short, I’m one of those weird people who doesn’t care what it looks like on-screen while I’m editing it as long as the finished product looks like I want it to look.

Markdown brings the kind of precision I’m used to in LaTeX to the realm of writing HTML. One thing that it loses is all the markup (hence the name, I suppose). For example:

**bold** produces bold text, *italicized* produces italicized text. Similarly terse, readable syntax for headers, links, images, and so on. All of the common stuff that you’re used to when writing HTML, without … well, the HTML.

Apparently Markdown got huge a few years ago, and obsessive programmers like me have integrated it into all sorts of things. There’s a Markdown plugin for WordPress (in which I’m editing this post). Of course, there’s a Markdown mode for Emacs. The one piece of my daily routine that lacks Markdown is Evernote, unfortunately. I think I might be able to get around that with a clever combination of evernote-mode and markdown-mode. If I can figure something out, I’ll post it here.

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