On the marvelousness of markdown
Paul Thurrott wrote last month he “may or may not” write a book on Markdown.
“I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus,” he wrote on his website back on April 5. “But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called ‘On writing.’ We’ll see.”
As I said on Mastodon, it’s nearly impossible to overstate how meaningful Markdown has been to my journalistic career, as well as my writing in general. I have vivid memories of writing umpteenth essays in high school on a school computer running Windows 3.1; I used WordPerfect, and I have even stronger visceral memories of what a pain in the ass it was to format things in rich text. (For context, I was in high school from 1996–2000.) All I knew was a word processor, be it WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or even Apple’s Pages. Then about a year or two before I pivoted in 2013 to doing tech journalism full-time, I would write about Apple on my own little WordPress blog—fundamentally not dissimilar to what I do here at Curb Cuts, but without the name recognition I’ve earned over my career. I remember not wanting to use rich text, and happily discovered Markdown. I taught myself the syntax, loved its simplicity, and the rest is history. With few exceptions, every single word I’ve written for the last 15 or so years destined for the web have been written in Markdown—albeit much to the chagrin of precious few editors who’ve emailed me perplexed at the markup of my freelance drafts. In fact, one of my earliest bylines was this June 2013 piece for TidBITS about how Markdown makes writing a more accessible endeavor for me. It was a thrill to see my friend (and Markdown creator) John Gruber link to said story on Daring Fireball and say the piece “made my day.” We would meet in person in 2014 at XOXO in Portland, OR.
What app do I use nowadays? My favorite is MarkEdit on the Mac, but I like iA Writer too.
