Markdown Quick Start
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a way of quickly creating the kind of structure familiar from word processing, social media or email clients, using only plain text characters. This includes headings, bullet lists, numbered lists, bold and italic styling, hyperlinks, etc.
It’s ideal for jotting down ideas quickly with as much, or as little, styling and structure as you wish.
Basic Syntax
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
* bullet
or
- bullet
- [ ] to do
- [x] done
1. numbered list
2. another item
*Italics* or **bold** text
~~struck through~~ and ==highlighted== text
> a quoted paragraph
`inline code`
*** (divider)
[Burst Notes Home Page](https://www.publicspace.net/BurstNotes/)
[[Another note]] (a wiki link, as used by Obsidian)
A block of code or anything else that must stay exactly as typed goes between two lines of three backticks:
```
a fenced code block
```
Often this plain text then gets rendered as HTML on a webpage and the “markup” part of the text disappears and is replaced with actual styling.
Headers are what Burst Notes navigates by
Burst Notes reads the # headers of your file and turns them into the tree you see in the command window. # Projects with ## Website and ## Taxes underneath gives you a Projects item you can drill into and two sub-items to append to. Everything between one header and the next header of any level is that header’s section, and that is where appended lines go. A file with no headers at all works too: lines are appended to the end.
How Burst Notes shows it
The built-in editor has two tabs on the same text. The Visual tab (Command-1) hides the markers as soon as it recognises them, so ## Today looks like a heading and - [ ] milk like a checkbox; lists continue when you press Return and typing [] turns a line into a to-do. The Source tab (Command-2) shows the characters exactly as they are stored, in a monospaced font, and changes nothing as you type. Command-P jumps between the two.
Earlier versions of Burst Notes had a separate preview mode; it is no longer needed, since the Visual tab is the preview and is editable.
Fast Todo Syntax
For faster to-do entry, the Visual tab understands a shorthand at the start of a line:
[] text -> - [ ] text
[x] text -> - [x] text
Command-T or Option-Space turns any existing line into a to-do and ticks or unticks it.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The editor’s shortcuts and the command window’s are listed together on the Keyboard Shortcuts page.
Other Editors
Burst Notes is designed for quick capture, not as a full-featured text editor or to-do list manager.
The power of Markdown is that you can edit it in any text editor. There are dedicated Markdown applications such as Obsidian, iA Writer or Typora, but you can use a plain text editor like BBEdit, Nova, Sublime Text, programming or web design tools, etc. Burst Notes can open the current file in several of these directly, see Managing Files.
Markdown is not a real standard and it has evolved in many different flavors, but the beauty of its plain text with markup approach is that you can still create and edit markup even if the editor does not know how to render it. Burst Notes leaves anything it does not understand, such as front matter or Obsidian’s [[wiki links]], exactly as it found it.