Markdown in five minutes — the syntax that covers 90% of what you'll write

Markdown is the reason a README, a GitHub comment, a Reddit post, and half the notes apps in existence all let you write **bold** and get bold. It's a tiny set of plain-text conventions that turn into formatted HTML, and the genuinely good news is that the part you'll use every day takes about five minutes to learn. Here's that part.

The stuff you'll use constantly

# Big heading
## Smaller heading

**bold** and *italic*

- a bullet
- another bullet

1. numbered
2. list

[link text](https://example.com)

`inline code`

> a quote

That's most of it. Headings are # marks (more hashes = smaller). Asterisks do bold and italic. Hyphens make bullet lists, numbers make ordered ones. Links are [text](url). Backticks wrap code. You now know enough Markdown to write almost anything you'll need to.

bold text.- first- seconda link→TitleSome bold text.• first• seconda link

The two things that trip people up

Blank lines matter. Markdown uses an empty line to separate paragraphs and blocks. Two lines of text with no blank line between them often collapse into one. If your list or your paragraph break isn't rendering, the fix is almost always "add a blank line."

Code blocks use three backticks, not one. One backtick is for inline code; three backticks on their own line start and end a fenced block, and you can name the language after the opening fence (like ```js) to get syntax highlighting. This one catches everyone at least once.

The bits beyond the basics

Once the essentials are second nature, a few more earn their keep:

• Tables with pipes and dashes — fiddly to type, which is exactly why a preview helps.
• Task lists — - [ ] and - [x] render as checkboxes on GitHub and many tools.
• Images — ![alt text](url), the same as a link with a ! in front.
• Nested lists — indent by two spaces to make a sub-bullet.

Why "flavours" exist: plain Markdown doesn't define tables or task lists — those come from GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM), the dialect most tools now use. If a table renders on GitHub but not somewhere else, that's the flavour difference, not a mistake on your part.

Why a live preview beats memorizing

Markdown is forgiving until it isn't, and the failures are visual — a heading that didn't take, a list that ran together, a link that came out as literal brackets. The fastest way to learn it, and to get a tricky document right, is to type on one side and watch the rendered result update on the other. You see immediately when a blank line fixes a list or when your table syntax is off, instead of committing and discovering it later.

Writing and previewing it

Primova's Markdown Preview is exactly that split view: Markdown on the left, live-rendered HTML on the right, updating as you type. It's handy for drafting a README, sanity-checking a comment before you post it, or just learning the syntax by poking at it. Everything renders locally in your browser, so whatever you're drafting stays on your machine. Open it up and try the cheatsheet above: Markdown Preview.