Writing in markdown
You will often need to use markdown, a markup language to format your plain text. With markdown, you can easily make text bold, italicized, and add nicely-formatted links - to name a few handy features!
Files with the .md extension, such as the commonly-used README.md file, are written in markdown.
In particular, GitHub uses a "dialect" of markdown often called GitHub-flavored markdown (GFM).
You don't need to worry too much about GFM, but you may come across this term reading docs from GitHub!
You will generally use markdown when writing:
- GitHub Issues
- GitHub Discussions
- R Markdown and/or Jupyter notebooks
- Documentation in
README.mdfiles
Learn more about markdown
Please see these resources to learn more about using markdown:
- GitHub markdown documentation
- A little tutorial where you can practice using markdown