📝 Markdown Editor

Markdown is plain text with a small set of punctuation conventions. A line starting with one hash becomes a first-level heading, two hashes a second-level heading, and so on. Text wrapped in double asterisks becomes bold, single asterisks italic, double tildes strikethrough, and backticks inline code. A line starting with a greater-than sign is a blockquote, a hyphen begins a bulleted list item, and a number followed by a full stop begins a numbered one. Three backticks on their own line open and close a fenced code block, and three hyphens make a horizontal rule.

The toolbar simply writes that punctuation around your selection, so pressing bold wraps the highlighted words in double asterisks rather than applying any hidden formatting.

As the text changes, the marked parser reads it and produces HTML, which is displayed in the preview pane. The same HTML is what you get when you copy or download the HTML output, so what you see in the preview is what you take away.

Type this into the writing pane: a line reading hash space Release Notes, then a blank line, then a line reading double asterisk Version 2.1 double asterisk shipped on Tuesday, then a blank line, then two lines each starting with a hyphen and a space, reading Faster export and Fixed login bug.

That is 5 lines of source with 2 blank lines separating three blocks. The parser turns the first line into an h1 element containing Release Notes. The second block becomes a paragraph element in which Version 2.1 is wrapped in a strong element while the rest stays plain. The two hyphen lines become a single unordered list element containing 2 list items.

So 5 lines of Markdown produce 4 HTML elements at the top level of the list structure: one heading, one paragraph, one list wrapper and its two items. Copying the HTML gives you that markup ready to paste into a template, while copying the Markdown gives back exactly what you typed, character for character.

Markdown is not a single standard. The preview here follows the common GitHub-flavoured conventions that the marked parser implements, but other systems differ in the details. A platform may or may not support tables, task list checkboxes, footnotes or automatic linking of bare URLs, and some convert single line breaks into line breaks while others require two trailing spaces or a blank line. Always check an important document in the system that will actually publish it before assuming the preview matches.

Raw HTML mixed into Markdown is another source of surprises. Many static site generators allow it, while comment fields and forum editors frequently strip it out for safety.

On the draft itself, the text is saved to your browser's local storage as you type. That protects against an accidental refresh, but it lives only in that browser on that device: it is not synchronised anywhere, it is not visible to anyone else, and clearing your site data or using a private window will remove it. Download the file for anything you need to keep.