Markdown is a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber in 2004. It lets you write formatted documents using plain text — no need for a word processor or HTML tags. You write **bold** and it renders as bold. You write # Heading and it renders as a large heading.

The core idea: markdown should be readable as plain text, even without rendering. A markdown file should look natural and clean in any text editor.

# My Project

This is a **great** project that helps developers *save time*.

## Features
- Fast
- Free
- Open source

Markdown files are plain text files, usually saved with a .md or .markdown extension. When you open them in a markdown-aware tool (GitHub, VS Code, Notion, etc.), the tool's parser converts the markup into HTML, which is then styled and displayed.

The conversion pipeline looks like this:

Because markdown is just text, it's version-controllable with Git, diff-able, searchable, and works in any editor. This is a big reason why developers love it.

Here's the core markdown syntax you'll use 90% of the time:

Headings

# H1 — Page title (use once)
## H2 — Section
### H3 — Sub-section

Text formatting

**bold text**
*italic text*
~~strikethrough~~
`inline code`

Lists

- Unordered item
- Another item
  - Nested item

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

Links and images

[Link text](https://example.com)
![Image alt text](https://example.com/image.png)

Code blocks

```python
def greet(name):
    return f"Hello, {name}!"
```

Blockquotes and tables

> This is a blockquote.

| Name  | Role     |
|-------|----------|
| Alice | Engineer |
| Bob   | Designer |

For the full reference, see the Markdown Cheat Sheet.

The original markdown spec left some things undefined, so different platforms created their own extensions. These are called "flavors." Here are the most common ones: