Markdown everywhere

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Apr 14, 2012 at 11:19 PM

I’m moving towards a more compact setup of software for my writing, borrowing several concepts and tips from people in this forum, as well as the Cyborganize process. My main goal is to maintain disturbance-free, focus facilitating environments for writing (WriteMonkey, Resophnotes) and editing texts (Brainstorm, Sense), as well as flexible repositories for organising the end products of various such procedures (ConnectedText, Dokuwiki)

Within this context, plain text is a powerful ally, with its ability to work as a universal format for exchanging texts among my applications, as pointed out in the past http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/10506

However, plain text is, well plain, which is not ideal when one is not writing continuous texts as in fiction, but rather more technical documents with bullets, emphasis and links. Of course, one could use HTML, but then s/he would be programming, not writing.

Markdown to the rescue; this interesting “un-markup” language http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ combines the best of two worlds by allowing texts to be marked in an intuitive and human-readable manner, which can directly convert to HTML. As an example, the following Markdown will produce a level-3 heading, a title in bold and a bulleted list. How much simpler can it get?

### ESSENTIAL SOFTWARE ###

__Office__

* Brainstorm
* Resophnotes + Simplenotes sync |
* TextPad
* WriteMonkey

I was positively surprised by the support to Markdown: from the software mentioned earlier, ResophNotes, WriteMonkey and Dokuwiki will all understand Markdown (the latter with the help of a plugin). The ones that don’t will not be bothered by it, so I can use it anyway.

Now if it were only supported as an alternative markup in ConnectedText…