As someone who has been around the tech block a few times, I've seen my fair share of things that purport to make life a bit more efficient. Sometimes those things pan out, and other times, not so much.
But there's one bit of technology that came about in 2004 that has made things easy... for those who know about it and how to use it.
That bit is called markdown, and it's a lightweight markup language.
Also: The 4 best MacOS text editors (and why you should be using one)
Markup is all about adding special annotations or codes to plain text to convey additional information about the content. The types of markup include:
Markdown allows you to format text using plain syntax, so it's easier to create readable documents, emails, and even websites. I look at markdown as a more efficient method of adding markup to text. With markdown, you don't have to go through the process of selecting text, using your mouse to click on a formatting option, and then applying the option. Instead, markdown is a text-based shorthand for formatting.
First off, there are a lot of desktop apps that make use of markdown. A good portion of note-taking apps support markdown, and knowing this shorthand can make using those apps more efficient.
Also: My 5 favorite note-taking apps for staying organized on a desktop
The types of apps that support markdown include:
The benefits of using markdown are that it's easy to use, converts automatically, and is portable (so files can be shared between devices, operating systems, and apps), and it is easily shared between devices, operating systems, or even text editors. The common use cases for markdown include blog posts and articles, emails and letters, documentation, and README files.
The gist is that markdown is used by so many apps for so many things.
Using markdown is just a matter of typing and knowing the shortcuts for different types of markup. Here are some of the more popular examples.
You can even do tables with markdown, like so:
| Column1 | Column2 |
|---------|---------|
| Row 1 | Data 1 |
| Row 2 | Data 2 |
#Or with alignment:
| Left Aligned | Centered | Right Aligned |
|:-------------:|:--------:|--------------:|
| Cell A | Cell B | Cell C |
And that, my **friends**, is#markdown. Make sure to keep coming back to [](https://www.zdnet.com) for all your technology news, opinions, reviews, and how-tos.
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