Learn Markdown in 3 minutes

I had to typing a short article on my laptop. This article contained several links and pictures. So apparently, a simple plain text editor couldn’t meet my need. If you happened to need a good but still simple note editor as well, read on.

What is Markdown? It’s a markup language. A very lightweight one. If you want to know more about what ‘s markup language and what’s Markdown, you could see here.

Here, I’m going to show you the most basic Markdown syntax:

1. how to title or heading
2. how to emphasis a word in a sentence
3. how to list.
4. how to put links
5. images

Use # for the Title

# This is the title

Use a Hashtag to Title /Photo Credit: Author

Or you could use 2 or more hashtags for a smaller title like this:

## This is smaller

Emphasis

When we type many sentences, sometimes we need to emphasis a word or a sentence. We could just surround that word using 2 underscores like this:

Markdown is a _lightweight_ and easy-to-use syntax for styling all forms of writing on the web.

Left is text with Markdown language; Right is the result. /Photo Credit: Author

Or we could use asterisks to surround that word.

**Markdown** is a way to format words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists. There are many things we can do with Markdown.

Using asterisks for emphasis. / Photo Credit: Author

To-Do List or more

Another useful function using Markdown for our notes is we could list very easily. Just use a number or an asterisk to achieve that. Very straightforward.

1. Buy milk
2. Post office
3. make an appointment
...
or use *
* The mission
* Hackernoon
* OneZero
......

Use Asterisk to list in Markdown /Photo Credit: Author

Use numbers to list. /Photo Credit: Author

Link

If we want to embed a link into a sentence, we could use:

Markdown is a [lightweight markup language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language). Some people also called it a simple markup language.

Simply put, the syntax is like this:

[the sentence or the word](the link other could click)

Let reader to click the sentence. /Photo Credit: Author

How About Image

Taking notes without images is too plain. The syntax is like this:

![Text](URL)

Basically it is almost the same with the link. Just adding an exclamation mark in front of []().

That’s all.

Now you could start to use Markdown language to take a note. Personally I use HackMD, an online note editor. You could check out my brief introduction of it here. Of course there are other Markdown online or desktop tools (For mac and for Linux).

Happy writing!