Mastering Markdown
3 minute read Download PDF version
Markdown is a lightweight and easy-to-use syntax for styling all forms of writing on the GitHub platform.

What you will learn:

How the Markdown format makes styled collaborative editing easy
How Markdown differs from traditional formatting approaches
How to use Markdown to format text
How to leverage GitHub’s automatic Markdown rendering
How to apply GitHub’s unique Markdown extensions

What is Markdown?
Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *.

You can use Markdown most places around GitHub:

Gists
Comments in Issues and Pull Requests
Files with the .md or .markdown extension
For more information, see “Writing on GitHub” in the GitHub Help.

Examples
Text Lists Images Headers & Quotes Code Extras
It's very easy to make some words bold and other words italic with Markdown. You can even link to Google!
It's very easy to make some words bold and other words italic with Markdown. You can even link to Google!

Syntax guide
Here’s an overview of Markdown syntax that you can use anywhere on GitHub.com or in your own text files.

Headers

This is an

tag

This is an

tag

This is an

tag

Emphasis

This text will be italic
This will also be italic

This text will be bold
This will also be bold

You can combine them
Lists

Unordered

• Item 1
• Item 2
  • Item 2a
  • Item 2b
    Ordered

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3
   1. Item 3a
   2. Item 3b
      Images

Format:
Links

http://github.com - automatic!
GitHub
Blockquotes

As Kanye West said:

We're living the future so
the present is our past.
Inline code

I think you should use an
<addr> element here instead.

GitHub Flavored Markdown
GitHub.com uses its own version of the Markdown syntax that provides an additional set of useful features, many of which make it easier to work with content on GitHub.com.

Note that some features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are only available in the descriptions and comments of Issues and Pull Requests. These include Hive account@mentions as well as references to SHA-1 hashes, Issues, and Pull Requests. Task Lists are also available in Gist comments and in Gist Markdown files.

Syntax highlighting

Here’s an example of how you can use syntax highlighting with GitHub Flavored Markdown:

function fancyAlert(arg) {
  if(arg) {
    $.facebox({div:'#foo'})
  }
}

You can also simply indent your code by four spaces:

function fancyAlert(arg) {
  if(arg) {
    $.facebox({div:'#foo'})
  }
}

Here’s an example of Python code without syntax highlighting:

def foo():
if not bar:
return True
Task Lists

• [x] Hive account@mentions, #refs, links, formatting, and tags supported
• [x] list syntax required (any unordered or ordered list supported)
• [x] this is a complete item
• [ ] this is an incomplete item
  If you include a task list in the first comment of an Issue, you will get a handy progress indicator in your issue list. It also works in Pull Requests!

Tables

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens - (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe |:

First Header	Second Header
Content from cell 1	Content from cell 2
Content in the first column	Content in the second column

Would become:

First Header Second Header
Content from cell 1 Content from cell 2
Content in the first column Content in the second column
SHA references

Any reference to a commit’s SHA-1 hash will be automatically converted into a link to that commit on GitHub.

16c999e8c71134401a78d4d46435517b2271d6ac
mojombo@16c999e8c71134401a78d4d46435517b2271d6ac
mojombo/github-flavored-markdown@16c999e8c71134401a78d4d46435517b2271d6ac
Issue references within a repository

Any number that refers to an Issue or Pull Request will be automatically converted into a link.

#1
mojombo#1
mojombo/github-flavored-markdown#1
Username Hive account@mentions

Typing an @ symbol, followed by a username, will notify that person to come and view the comment. This is called an “Hive account@mention”, because you’re mentioning the individual. You can also Hive account@mention teams within an organization.

Automatic linking for URLs

Any URL (like http://www.github.com/) will be automatically converted into a clickable link.

Strikethrough

Any word wrapped with two tildes (like this) will appear crossed out.

Emoji

GitHub supports emoji! :sparkles: :camel: :boom:

To see a list of every image we support, check out the Emoji Cheat Sheet.