Layman’s Guide to Markdown on Mattermost
One of the biggest challenges with text-based communication is that oftentimes context, emotions, and intentions can get lost in translation.
On the other hand, when we speak to one another, we have the advantage of inflection, tone, and body language to help convey our points effectively.
Historically, adding context to text-based communications involved writing HTML code—something that was a bit too complicated for the average internet user.
To solve this problem, Markdown—a lightweight markup language—emerged in 2004.
Thanks to Markdown, formatting text is incredibly easy. If you want text to render in italics, simply add an asterisk on either side of the language in question (e.g., *hello* renders as hello).
Markdown on Mattermost
In response to community feedback and in an effort to make it easier for teams to communicate with colleagues across the world, we added Markdown support to Mattermost in 2015.
(Coincidentally, Slack did the same thing the following week.)
Are you new to using Markdown on Mattermost?
What follows is a brief overview of some of the ways you can use Markdown to communicate more effectively on Mattermost.
1. Text style
| Input | Output |
| _Mattermost_ | Mattermost |
| **DevOps** | DevOps |
| **_open source_** | open source |
| ~~legacy tools~~ |
2. Links
| Input | Output |
| [Mattermost](https://mattermost.com) | Mattermost |
3. Emojis
4. Lists
5. In-line code
| Input | Output |
| `monospace` | monospace |
6. Headings
| Input | Output |
| ## Large Heading | Large Heading |
| ### Smaller Heading | Smaller Heading |
| #### Even Smaller Heading | Even Smaller Heading |
7. Block quotes
You don’t need to memorize all of these commands, either.
Just bookmark this handy doc, refer to it when you’re in a pinch, and get ready to start communicating with more precision on Mattermost. There, you can also learn how to use Markdown to make code snippets, math formulas, and tables appear in special formats, too.
Using Markdown to format text is one of the features our team uses to be more productive on Mattermost.
If you want to learn more ways to increase your proficiency on Mattermost, check out this blog post that highlights our 10 favorite productivity hacks.
(Editor’s note: This post was written by Stu Doherty, Senior Customer Success Manager at Mattermost, Inc. If you have any feedback or questions about Layman’s Guide to Markdown on Mattermost, please let us know.)
