The Markdown Cheat Sheet: Every Syntax on One Page

July 29, 20265 min read

Everything below is Markdown you can copy, paste and use today. Bookmark this page: it is the whole syntax on one screen, with what each line actually turns into. Every example here was rendered by QuickMark's own engine, so what you see is what you get.

The five you will use every day

# Heading 1
## Heading 2

**bold** and *italic*

- a bullet
- another

[a link](https://example.com)

That is genuinely most of it. Markdown is small on purpose. The rest of this page is the long tail, roughly in the order people reach for it.

Text

**bold**
*italic*
***both***
~~strikethrough~~
==highlight==
`inline code`
H~2~O and X^2^

Underscores work too: _italic_ and __bold__. Pick one style and stay with it. Asterisks are the safer habit because underscores inside a word (snake_case_name) can trip some parsers.

Headings

One # per level, up to six, and always a space after the hashes. #Heading with no space is not a heading.

# Level 1
## Level 2
### Level 3
#### Level 4

Lists

- Bullet
- Another
  - Indent two spaces

1. First
2. Second

- [x] Done
- [ ] Not done

Numbered lists renumber themselves. You can write 1. on every line and the output still counts 1, 2, 3, which makes reordering painless.

Links and images

[text](https://example.com)
<https://example.com>
https://example.com
![alt text](cat.png)

An image is a link with ! in front. Bare URLs turn into links on their own, so you rarely need the angle brackets. Links open in a new tab, and the path in an image can be relative to the file, which is how a screenshot sitting next to your notes shows up inline.

Tables

| Item | Qty | Price |
|:-----|:---:|------:|
| Pens |  12 | $3.50 |
| Pads |   4 | $8.00 |

The colons in the dashed row set alignment: left, centre, right. Your pipes do not need to line up in the source, though it is easier to read when they do. Full detail in how to make a table in Markdown.

Code

Use `git status` inline.

```swift
struct Note {
    var title: String
}
```

struct Note {
    var title: String
}

The word after the opening backticks is the language, and it is what turns the colours on. QuickMark highlights 30+ languages; swift, js, python, bash, json and sql all work. Leave it off and you get a plain grey block.

Quotes and callouts

> A plain quote.

> [!NOTE] Optional title
> A callout. Also [!TIP],
> [!WARNING], [!IMPORTANT].

Everything else

---

Footnote here[^1]

[^1]: The note text.

:rocket: :tada:

\*not italic\*

Three dashes on their own line is a horizontal rule. A backslash escapes any character that would otherwise be syntax, which is how you write a literal asterisk or underscore.

Math and diagrams

Neither is standard Markdown, but both are common enough that a cheat sheet without them is incomplete. QuickMark renders both with nothing to install.

Inline: $E = mc^2$

$$
\int_0^1 x^2 dx = \frac{1}{3}
$$

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  A --> B
```

Math uses KaTeX syntax between $ for inline and $$ for a centred block. Diagrams use a mermaid code fence. Here is what both look like rendered on a phone, no plugins, no setup:

Three things that surprise people

A single line break does nothing. Two lines of text with one newline between them become one paragraph. To force a line break, end the first line with two spaces, or leave a blank line to start a new paragraph.

Quotes and dashes get prettified. Straight quotes become curly ones, -- becomes an en dash, and ... becomes a single ellipsis character. Lovely in prose, occasionally surprising when you meant the literal characters.

Your file stays plain text. None of this is stored as formatting. Open the same .md in any editor on any machine in ten years and it still reads fine. That is the entire point of Markdown, and the reason it outlasted every rich-text format it competed with.

The whole sheet, at a glance

The fastest way to learn any of this is to type it and watch it change. Paste the table above into the live preview in your browser, or open a .md file on your Mac and press Space in Finder to see it rendered instantly.