# Markdown is eating the world

The Way of Markdown

There's a better way to do your notes, docs and site. It's plain text.

A practical guide to doing it with files you own, and the philosophy underneath: simple, open, yours.

Start the roadmap New here? Markdown in 10 minutes

Inside a markdown file

Exploded view of a markdown file: the plain text file, its frontmatter fields, its headings and lists, its links, and the rendered page any tool can show from it.
A plain text file, its fields, its headings and lists, its links, and the page any tool can show from it.

Start here

  1. Learn the basicsTen minutes. Headings, lists, links. Or try it live
  2. Pick what you're buildingA site, a knowledge base, a wiki. Each guide says what works, what you give up, and the steps.
  3. Move one thingExport from Notion or Google Docs. Start with one folder, not your whole life.

Contents

Learn it

A hash for a heading, stars for bold, a dash for a list. That's most of it, and AI already writes it for you. Then: tables, links between notes, fields on a file, HTML when you need it.

It's already in more places than you've noticed: Google Docs, Obsidian, GitHub, Slack, every AI chat.

The basics Markdown in every app

One file, two views

The same note shown raw on the left and rendered on the right.
What you type on the left, what you see on the right. Same file.

Why

Nobody cares about markdown, the same way nobody cares about ASCII. You care about the thing you want to make. Markdown is the rare case where the format made the difference, and it wasn't a straight line.

People could write it by hand, so tools took it as their format. Tools took it, so more people wrote it. Twenty years of that, and the tools got good. AI arrived late and speaks it by default.

That's the whole philosophy: simple pieces you own beat one monolith you rent.

Why markdown-based The manifesto

Two forces

A loop: more people writing markdown means more tools reading it, and back again, with AI joining late.
More people writing it meant more tools reading it, and back again. AI joined late.

Made by Rufus Pollock and folks at Datopian, as markdown files in the open. This page is itself markdown with a little HTML in it, which is rather the point.

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