The basics

Headings, emphasis, lists and links — the whole of everyday Markdown.

Markdown is a way of writing plain text that turns into HTML. You have been reading it: these lessons are written in it.

Headings are hashes. One for the page title, more for sections:

# A title
## A section

Emphasis is asterisks — one pair for italic, two for bold:

*quietly* and **loudly**

Lists are dashes, or numbers:

- milk
- bread

1. wake up
2. write

And a link is text in brackets, address in parentheses:

[RunSnip](https://runsnip.com)

Why a blank line matters

Markdown decides where a paragraph ends by looking for a blank line. Two lines of text with nothing between them become one paragraph. This surprises everybody once.

Try it

The playground shows the rendered result. Write a heading, a bold word and a two-item list — then remove a blank line and watch two paragraphs become one.