43 Folders

Back to Work

Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

Join us via RSS, iTunes, or at 5by5.tv.

”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

In further praise of Markdown

Sweet, lovely Markdown I got my first PalmPilot in 1997 or so, and I knew it had begun to get its hooks into me when Grafitti characters started popping up in my longhand—most often as “e’s??? that looked like backward threes and “m’s??? that resembled McDonalds’ golden arches. It was a testament to how even your most ingrained physical gestures can be rewired over a relatively short period of time.

Well, friends, I now find I’m writing—in longhand, mind you—using Markdown. For those who haven’t tried it yet, Markdown is John Gruber’s insanely great syntax and transformation tool for turning structured text into valid XHTML.

I’m discovering that, when I’m jotting quickly, headings become “#s??? and bullets are “*s.??? Of course the sheer madness here is that drawing a three-stroke asterisk takes much more time than, say, making a dot, and don’t even ask about a hash that requires four lines. Such is the influence of Mr. Gruber’s wonderfully useful tool and its ubiquity in my workflow; its irreplaceable value in my typing world has bled over into my increasingly disused handwriting world—where it’s actually a huge mental deficit. Stupid brain: you’re going to bed without your serotonin tonight.

As ever, I really recommend you take a spin with Markdown, particularly in the context of gu.st’s wonderful HumaneText No.4. It’s a terrific OS X Service that combines Markdown with Smartypants and html2text (Aaron Swartz’s elegant reverse-MD Python script).

HumaneText is a breeze to install, and I promise it will shave minutes of brainless markup from your day, every day—even if you do start noticing the disturbing side effect of occasionally replacing a perfectly useful straight line with “***???. I, for one, can live with that.

(For you Wintel/Cygwin kids, be sure to check out Sippey’s smart little hack: markdown for windows.)

About Merlin

Merlin's picture

Bio

Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster. He’s best known for being the guy who created the website you’re reading right now. He lives in San Francisco, does lots of public speaking, and helps make cool things like You Look Nice Today, Back to Work, and Kung Fu Grippe. Also? He’s writing this book, he lives with this face, he suffers from this hair, he answers these questions, and he’s had this life. So far.

Merlin’s favorite thing he’s written in the past few years is an essay entitled, “Cranking.”

 
EXPLORE 43Folders THE GOOD STUFF

Popular
Today

Popular
Classics

An Oblique Strategy:
Honor thy error as a hidden intention


STAY IN THE LOOP:

Subscribe with Google Reader

Subscribe on Netvibes

Add to Technorati Favorites

Subscribe on Pageflakes

Add RSS feed

The Podcast Feed

Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

Scared Shitless

Merlin’s scared. You’re scared. Everybody is scared.

This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »