Markdown is is a way of writing plain text (without formatting), so that it can be converted to rich text (with links, bullet points, headers. bolds, italics, etc). This is the exact same editing syntax used for Mattermost, SpaceTime and Loomio, so it's a case of "buy one, get *two* for free"! One of the advantages is that you can perform all formatting tasks (Bolding, italics, bullet points, headings etc) directly from the keyboard, without needing to click anywhere.

Overview

Markdown was created in 2004 by John Gruber and the late and much missed Aaron Swartz. Their goal was enabling people to "to write using an easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text format, optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)."

Further Resources

The first two links come from Loomio themselves:

• Basic Loomio markdown Tutorial
• More "narrative" Markdown tutorial by Rich Bartlett
• The Markdown Guide (Probably the best and most modern resource for learning Markdown
• Easy Interactive Markdown Tutorial
• Learn The Basics Of Markdown in 10 Minutes With This Video Tutorial
• Full Markdown syntax
• Extended Markdown syntax
• Online Markdown editor
• Full Markdown syntax
• The Ultimate Markdown Guide (Or so the author says!)
• Markdown syntax cheatsheet in PDF (includes Github-flavored Markdown)
• Wikipedia entry for Markdown