Hey everyone, I figured that some new users might not know that comments and posts have a formatting standard called Markdown.
In simple terms, Markdown is a (semi)universal language that uses formatting symbols to give a certain style to a portion of text.
This quick guide can help you to write in a way that’s more appealing and easy to read.
| FORMATTING | SYNTAX | EXAMPLE |
|---|---|---|
| New line | put two spaces at the end of the line you want to break | Line__ |
| New paragraph | return two times at the end of the paragraph | Line↵↵ |
| Horizontal rule | between each paragraph put three “-” or “*” | *** |
| Bold | put your text between two “**” or “__” | **Bold** or __Bold__ |
| Italic | put your text between two “*” or “_” | *Italic* or _Italic_ |
| Subscript | put your text between two “~” | ~Subscript~ |
| Superscript | put your text between two “^” | ^Superscript^ |
Inline code |
put your text between two “`” | `sudo rm -rf /` |
| Headings and Titles | put one or more “#” at the beginning of the line | # Headings for level 1, ## Headings for level 2… |
| Blockquotes | put “>” at the beginning of the line | > Blockquote |
| Links | put the the text between [ ] and the link between ( ) | [Links]( https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ ) |
Images  |
like links but you put “!” before the first square bracket |  |
You can also do unordered lists using “-” at the beginning of each line:
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
will become
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
Or ordered list by putting “1.” at the beginning of each line:
1. Salt
2. Potatoes
3. Beans
will become
- Salt
- Potatoes
- Beans
You can save other users from spoilers by encasing a paragraph between a section that starts with ":::" followed by a space and the word “spoiler” + the title of the spoiler and ends with “:::”. The spoiler will be hidden inside a menu and you’ll be able to see it if you click on it
::: spoiler warning! spoiler!
the butler did it
:::
will become
warning! spoiler!
the butler did it
In the end you can also format big code blocks by putting “```” at the beginning and at the end of each paragraph
```
println(“Hello World!”)
```
will become
println("Hello World!")
Last but not least remember that you can always use break formatting syntax by putting “\” in front of a character:
so if I want “^” in my text without having the rest of the paragraph in superscript, I’m simply going to write “\^”
I’m so confused about the new line syntax. Why can’t I just do a single new line and keep typing? Why does the previous line have to end with a double space?
It’s weird, what is the benefit there?
If I would guess, then it has to do with making long lines fit in a window without requiring horizontal scrolling.
Markdown is used a lot in the context of software development. Software code is usually accompanied by a readme, detailing what it does, how to setup your environment for development, how to contribute, etc.
The defacto standard is to write this in markdown. Since it’s written in a software development program (an IDE), you don’t have text wrapping, meaning lines continue when they don’t fit in the window. This is because otherwise the code becomes unreadable. Most code can also be kept to fairly short lines, normally not requiring any horizontal scrolling. However, a long sentence in a readme will easily become much longer than a line of code. So being able to break a line anywhere without having an actual line break in your rendered output is super useful for that.
This is btw how html also behaves. Markdown gets rendered to html.