Excerpt from my Sent folder: Markdown

April 1, 2005, to John Gruber:

John, I just wanted to write to thank you for Markdown, which is one of the coolest and most useful tools I’ve come across in a long time. I’m an English professor who does a lot of writing, and one of my frustrations over the years has been dealing with the various file formats of the text editors and word processors that I’ve used: different versions of Word and AppleWorks, RTF files, Mellel, and now Pages. I have spent way too much time over the years cleaning up old files to make them usable again – which is one of the reasons I started using BBEdit: it will open anything, and you can’t clean up a file you can’t open. […]

Markdown, in conjunction with BBEdit 8, has pretty much solved my problems. The Markdown syntax is highly intuitive – relying on the conventions of plain text email was a brilliant stroke on your part – and enables me to use very straightforwardly all the formatting options that I normally need, including some that were difficult or impossible to access via Ulysses, whose file conversion tools aren’t nearly as good as Markdown’s. And now that BBEdit uses the OS X system spellchecker, and has one of the best implementations of drawers (which I usually despise) that I’ve seen, I have the best tools I have ever had as I move into my next book project. But without Markdown I’d still lack a really satisfying writing environment. Markdown allows me to write almost completely in plain text – this focusing on composition rather than formatting – but allows me to add formatting options when I need to. When I’m finished writing a piece, I run Markdown and save the document as HTML; then I can send it to anyone in that format; or, if someone happens to need RTF, it’s trivial to open it in TextEdit and convert.

This got a very kind reply from Mr. Gruber.

It’s a bit of a shock to realize that I have been writing almost everything in Markdown (and writing my Markdown largely in BBEdit) for twenty-one years.

Anil Dash, from a great post on the history and (now) ubiquity of Markdown:

As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead.

You know, that really is hard to believe … but true! It was a different world then.