Recently I got myself immersed in the world of markdown. Maybe others have already been at it for years, but I thought to myself that its never too late to pick up some new skill which I could put to use in my day to day life.
So I googled up stuff to quickly understand what markdowns are all about and how this is a quick and effortless way of formatting text. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax aimed at making writing for the internet easier. It has simple syntax for marking parts of the text as bold or italics or have headers of varying sizes as one would use in html. But markdown is non intrusive and quickly gets out of the way when its being read as plain text. After pondering over the syntax and dabbling with a quick tutorial I was ready to get my hands dirty.
I found an online editor called Hashify which allowed me to start writing basic markdown and try my hand at creating bullet lists, write some code snippets or arrange chunks of information into well formatted text. Snapshot shows hashify in action. It quickly shows the preview in the right pane and I was good to go in no time. hashify did have some limitations was I was not able to save or export my work in the comventional sense. It did allow me to bit.ly the url and share it over twitter which wasn’t to my exact taste.
That limitation was quickly resolved by switching the online editor to dellinger.io. This allowed me to export the markdown to either pdf or html which suited me perfectly. More so, it allows to sync md files with github, dropbox, google drive giving the user a range of options to choose from. I think I will settle for this as my goto online editor for markdown.
So far so good. I was still getting the hang of it, when I started thinking on ways to put this to use. The most obvious was to take effective notes. I read stuff online, new technologies or tools that will help me be a better programmer or a better tinkerer at linux. And more often than not, the hand written notes, I might have scribbled at the time, do not survive the test of time. I know I would probably never find them handy or worse they may be mistaken for trash paper and end up in the bin. With markdown, I could arrange the topic into sections, bullet points, have cross referenced urls for further reading, include images or diagrams for reference et al. The formatting would give the notes a better shape and reading them back would also be a pleasure. I could see myself making more and more notes on tech topics, saving them to dropbox or exporting to pdf for printing and later reading.
Another thought was to make a TODO list using simple markdown syntax and then strike out the items that have been completed, add information or highlight items on the list that are priority and work my way with the tasks at hand. Possibilities were just beginning to open up.
I read in some documentation “Markdown is a simple way to format text that looks great on any device. It doesn’t do anything fancy like change the font size, color, or type — just the essentials, using keyboard symbols you already know.” The thing that caught my eye is it “looks great on any device”. Which means I could edit it on a laptop and still read it just as well on my mobile. This is where I thought I should probably look into some apps which allow cross platform editing for markdown.
SimpleNote showed up on the search results and I took to liking it immediately. It provided a simple clean interface for note taking with markdown support and seamlessly synched with devices on pc, mac and linux. This gave me a perfect way to scribble markdowns on my linux laptop and then refer them on my android mobile. This would be my go to software to have my tech notes synced across devices and also have options to export them to pdf or html.
Another native app that I found for linux was Remarkable. This is again a simple approach to markdown and the app features the similar layout with preview pane on the write. It is fully featured and completely customizable. It supports GFM (Github Floavoured Markdown) and has support for tables, checklists, images etc.
With enough understanding on the topic and a bunch of effective tools under my belt, I guess I am ready to deep dive into Markdown. Primary idea would be to keep using it as an effective note taking tool and have it synced with devices so that information is always at hand. In future I might want to explore the use of markdown to generate epub or mobi so that all the tech notes are available on the ebook reader. But that’s for another post.
Quick reference
https://www.markdownguide.org/assets/book/markdown-guide.pdf
https://commonmark.org/help/
https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/
https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet
Leisure Linux 