Markdown – Why I Turned To It In Hope To Never Look Back Again

As usually is the case with me, I tend to get on the bandwagon of something new just out of pure geeky curiosity.
When I first heard about Markdown, I thought to myself,

“How cool wouldn’t it be if I could completely do away with writing formatted documents in Word or Google Docs and instead do all my writing from the comfort of my code editor of choice?!”

Answer: Very, very cool!!

So, What’s Markdown?

Markdown is a markup language that you can use to assign structure to your document.
You use # to assign your main heading, ## to assign a sub heading, and so on.
Use a * followed by a space to assign it as a list, two ** directly before and after a word in order to make it bold. There are many other ways of giving stricture to your document.
See the official documentation to learn more.
Basically, Markdown works just like HTML. It’s a way to structure and give meaning to a document.
Markdown actually translates directly to HTML, which practically makes it a simpler and easier variant of HTML.

Keeping It Fast And Simple

After getting over the cool factor, I realized this could actually increase my writing productivity, due to the following points.

• Possibility to do all my writing (read coding) from the same piece of software.
• Enables me to completely focus on what I am writing instead of bothering with the document style at the same time. In other words – it’s distraction free.

Future Proof

If possible, I want to make sure my documents are as future proof as possible.
I wrote some documents using Star Office in the past. Those documents don’t work very well at all with current softwares.
Markdown is just plain text, so I can be almost 100% sure this is gonna be completely future proof no matter what software I choose to use in the future.

Bottom Line

If this is what enables me to stay away from complicated word processors, I’m all for staying with it, and I would highly recommend anyone who is tired of word processors to explore this as an alternative.

This blog article was of course written in Markdown.

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References/Credits

Daring Fireball: Markdown | http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
The Markdown Mindset | http://hiltmon.com/blog/2012/02/20/the-markdown-mindset/
The Future of Markdown | http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html
The Markdown Mark | http://dcurt.is/the-markdown-mark