Why Markdown? ⭐

Note: This is an early excerpt from my upcoming Markdown book. --Paul
In his essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line, author Neal Stephenson describes his transition from the Mac to Debian Linux in 1999, years before he would take the even more anachronistic step of using physical pen and paper for the initial phase of writing. I was an early fan of Stephenson thanks to his breakout 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, and as a personal computing enthusiast, I was fascinated that he wrote about his experiences with computers in such detail. And though it's horribly out-of-date these days, I've since re-read In the Beginning many times.

Stephenson--who went on to drop Linux for Mac OS X when that modern, Unix-based system appeared in the early 2000s--had discovered something. He used each version of Microsoft Word in turn, starting with version 1.0 for the Mac, until one day it stopped working so badly that he lost data. After a frantic and failed rescue mission, he realized that the problem wasn't just the app, it was also the format of the data. And so he switched to plain text.

"I had allowed myself to be seduced by all those flashy formatting options that hadn't even existed until GUIs had come along to make them practical," he writes in Command Line. "I had gotten into the habit of using them to make my documents look pretty."

Stephenson still writes in plain text, and his editing work on computers still occurs largely in a text editor all these years later. And though I will never understand or follow his paper and pen approach to writing first drafts, I do share his affinity for plain text and simple, text-based interfaces. At some point, you realize as a writer that it's not so much about the specific app you use to write as it is about that app delivering exactly what you need and otherwise getting the heck out of your way.

Today, any writer can benefit from important advances that Stephenson lacked when he was betrayed by Microsoft Word back in the 1990s: Thanks to the rise of the web as the primary publishing platform for written content, we now have lightweight Markdown formatting for plain text that lets writers focus on what they're writing and ignore all the bloated nonsense that accompanies heavily formatted documents like those one might create in Word or other word processors.

This is important because writing is a highly personal activity, a way to think and express ideas, including your innermost thoughts, and then share them with others. It's something ideally done in isolation and without distractions.

There are many ways to put ideas into words that can be read by others, but it's not the 20th century anymore. In this modern era, most formal writing is done using a computer and a word processing app. And most of the finished work is published and read digitally, not using paper.

Despite this, the tools and processes that writers use to produce their work are curiously old fashioned and...