Why I love Markdown
Fri 11 April 2025
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Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age!
Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!......
The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The only thing we wrote was BASIC programs. That was literally all you could do with it, in addition to playing great games like Choplifter.
A couple years later, and my mom brought home a Commodore 64, just for me. It had a cassette drive called a Datasette, which could very slowly read and write BASIC programs and games from ordinary audiocassettes, and could run programs via cartridge ROM, most of which were (of course!) games.
A little while later, my mom splurged on a floppy disk drive, which was incredibly expensive (the C64 floppy disk drive was also a computer; it had its own CPU and RAM). I remember getting Microsoft Flight Simulator for the C64, as well as some kind of word processing package.
The word processing package (I don't remember its name) was my least favorite program. It wasn't a game, it wasn't technologically interesting, it just spat words onto the screen, which I could then print out on the nifty Okimate 10 my mom got me. (Dang Mom, you sure got me a lot of kit when I was young! 🥹) It was very helpful for schoolwork, but not at all interesting to me.
It's curious to me that nobody who made 8-bit home computers seemed to think that writing would be a killer feature to have; only writing software in BASIC. The Atari 8-bit computers came close with a notepad like utility that would run from ROM if no ROM cartridges were present. It was only slightly limited in that while it could display and edit text onscreen, it couldn't (checks notes) load, save, or print text. 😄
Side note: when I was in High School in the early 90s, the one computer lab was full of old TANDY 8086 machines with CGA monitors. The only software they had (as I recall) was GWBASIC and Borland Turbo Pascal.
I distinctly remember witnessing fellow students typing up their papers for other (non-computery) classes on those machines using GWBASIC, which wasn't a word processor. They would write BASIC programs that looked like:
10 LPRINT "The History of the Roman Empire"
20 LPRINT ""
30 LPRINT "The Roman Empire was one of the biggest and most powerful empires"
40 LPRINT "in history. It started a long time ago, like before Jesus, and"
50 LPRINT "lasted for a really long time."
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THE HORROR!!! 🤣
Fortunately, by the time I was in High School, I was comfortable using word processors, and used MS Word for 4.0 Macintosh throughout most of my High School years. I also used HyperCard a fair bit for experimentation, programming, and even making my own fun little games. One thing I tried using HyperCard for was creating a journal in it. I recall spending several days writing my little teenaged thoughts and dreams down into that HyperCard stack.
At some point, I thought I might want to try to protect what I was writing from prying eyes. I looked at the different options for locking down the stack (as HyperCard documents/programs were called), and I think I knocked it down to the lowest permission level, which was read-only. I could no longer edit the text, but just look at it dumbly. There was no way (to my knowledge) to undo what I had done, and I didn't have any backups.
Proprietary binary formats bit me in the butt, hard. I didn't journal again for many, many years. I never saved that stack, and all those juvenile thoughts are lost to Data Heaven. I hope they're happy there.
Before markdown: can you wiki wiki that for me me?
Now, Markdown is already over 20 years old, but I don't think I heard of it until 2015 or so. At least, the oldest markdown file I could find on my computer is from 2014, and the oldest that I myself authored is from very early 2019 (which is also when I started daily-driving Linux at home again). But whenever I finally did discover Markdown, it was already quite familiar to me: "I know this! It's a UNIX syst—" *cough*
Sorry, what was I saying? Oh yes. "I know this! It's just wiki syntax!"
Now, to someone only/primarily familiar with MediaWiki, that statement is ludicrous. That is, of course, because MediaWiki has the most overwrought, over-engineered, over-complex syntax known to man. You might as well just write directly in OOXML and zip it up, along with your self-respect*.
* It's a joke hot-take, gentlemen. No, no, please put down the pitchforks. Thank you.
But I never messed with MediaWiki. I mean, not much. There were much simpler wikis like WikkaWiki and TiddlyWiki, which both had fairly simple markdown formats (particularly the classic TiddlyWiki 2.x series, which I'm still fond of).
What these basic wiki formats started doing, and what Markdown (somewhat) perfected was taking the already common-sensical plain-text formatting styles of the day, and making a usable markup language out of it.
So if you have ever spent any time in plain-text internet media like IRC or Usenet, you've probably seen text that looks something like this:
My dude, if you *don't* apologize for using Windows, I'm gonna slap you around with a big **fat** trout!
It's obvious by looking at the placement of asterisks that they are used for emphasis (in this case, emphasizing very important words in a very important sentence that is not at all just a silly thing I wrote to have an example). The single asterisk emphasizes the word "don't," and the double asterisk emphasizes "fat" even more.
So, Markdown takes this basic plain text style and interprets it as rich text:
My dude, if you don't apologize for using Windows, I'm gonna slap you around with a big fat trout!
Isn't it wonderful? How very ~edifying~!
Your text, your way
And so, the beauty of Markdown is that word processors finally become wholly irrelevant. TEXT IS KING, BAYBAY!
So, for writing any basic rich text (there are, of course serious limits to what Markdown can do), you are no longer bound to using a particular word processor, or any word processor. Want to write that big paper in Markdown in ed? Go for it!!
Want to do journaling in Markdown in Microsoft Word and manually save as plain text? You're a masochist, but okay??
Want to write documentation in Markdown in VSCode? I won't judge you!
(The heck I won't XD)
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 20
Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Humor Linux Non-religious post Philosophy Productivity Retrocomputing UNIX