Reasons to Learn Markdown

Slightly tangential, but I recently started using Mou (<a href="http://mouapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mouapp.com/</a>) and am totally hooked. Now, almost everything I write, I write in Markdown.<p>If you are looking for a Markdown editor for the Mac, check out Mou.<p>Disclaimer - I am in no way affiliated with the tool or it's developer. Just a happy user :)

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...<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29</a>

If you use vim as your primary Markdown editor, I'd suggest plasticboy's markdown plugin: <a href="https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown</a><p>I was using vim's default syntax highlighter for Markdown and ran into highlighting issues with unclosed single quotes.<p>Since a lot of Markdown files use .md instead of .markdown, I'd also suggest adding the file `~/.vim/ftplugin/modula2.vim` containing:<p><pre><code> setlocal filetype=mkd</code></pre>

Top reason for me: <i>separation of presentation and content</i><p>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.

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.

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

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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.wisd.com/nocs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wisd.com/nocs/</a>

Nothing beats Org (<a href="http://orgmode.org" rel="nofollow">http://orgmode.org</a>) 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.<p>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.<p>Make things easier for your users. Repeat.

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