The different flavors of markdown - Markdown Tutorial

- [Instructor] Markdown isn't a specific application, it's a file format that's written in plain text. Technically it's just a text file with special characters and that's what makes it different. That means that you can write markdown with the simplest of text editors. As you can see on this guide right here, there are many applications that will allow you to use Markdown, including tools that are familiar to you, like Discord, Notion and one of my favorites, Obsidian. But you can also write Markdown on websites like Reddit, GitHub, or in programming applications, like Visual Studio Code. A lot of those editors will add special features like syntax highlighting or coloring for Markdown files as long as you use a .md or a .markdown extension. For this course, I'll be using CodePen at codepen.io. You can get a free account or even use the examples without any account. It makes it easier to take a look at a preview of what you're writing in the code. I'll add an overlay at the beginning of every video with a sample of how the code looks at the beginning of my video so you can follow along if you want to. Feel free to use any other editor you want to. By the way, the text that I'll be using for this course happens to be an example of a prompt I might use for ChatGPT when I'm creating vertical videos. ChatGPT does let you use Markdown, and if you've copied code from ChatGPT, you may have noticed that it responds in Markdown, as well. When you first show up to the codepen.io links, your editor might look a little bit different than mine. I've hidden away these CSS tabs, but I did add some CSS to make the Markdown look a little nicer. But for the most part, you'll just be working in this tab called HTML, and notice that it's signed in as Markdown. On the right hand side, you'll see a preview, and as you work with the code on the left, you'll see it automatically update here on the right. All the videos might start with a different layout, as well. In CodePen, you can click on this icon and switch around the layout. I like the side-by-side view, but I think that default happens to be top and bottom, which I don't think gives you as much room. So go over here to this icon and then switch the layout that you want to use. So if you're ready to get started with the format, let's keep going.