# Markdown

## Buttondown has full-fledged Markdown support with some extra fun stuff, too.

For many people, your editor is the center of an email tool. Our editor is best-in-class, allowing you to write WYSIWYG with rich text – _and_ in Markdown, the lightning-fast language that has become standard throughout the industry.

While there are some additional features, they are tucked away nicely, allowing me to access them if I want to, without making the interface cluttered. Most importantly, everything I needed was right there in the main UI. I could log in, write a newsletter, check it, send a draft to a friend for review, and then hit send.

## What’s Markdown?

Markdown is a simple way of writing that gives you all of the richness of a full-fledged email editor, directly in your document. For example, instead of clicking a passage and bolding it, you add `**asterisks**` to your text, and Buttondown will automatically bold the text for you.

Markdown was created by [John Gruber](https://daringfireball.net/) in 2004, and has quickly become widespread thanks to its simple goal:

> The overriding design goal is to make \[Markdown\] as readable as possible… a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

If you’re new to Markdown, you can use [this tutorial](https://www.markdowntutorial.com/) to get up to speed.

For more on how you can use Markdown, check out our **[Markdown help document](https://docs.buttondown.com/using-markdown)**.

Buttondown is the _last_ email platform you’ll switch to.