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Markdown reference

markbird speaks GitHub-Flavored Markdown, plus diagrams, maths and callouts. One rendering pipeline produces the live preview, every export and the share viewer, so what you see while writing is what everyone else gets.

The basics

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

**bold**, _italic_, ~~strikethrough~~, `inline code`

- a bullet
- another

1. numbered
2. list

> a quote

[a link](https://markbird.md), ![an image](/path.png)

Tables

| Feature | Status |
| ------- | :----: |
| Tables  |   ✓    |

Colons in the separator row set alignment: :--- left, :---: centre, ---: right.

Task lists

- [x] Done
- [ ] Not done

Code blocks

Fence with three backticks and name the language for syntax highlighting:

```ts
export const render = (md: string) => pipeline.process(md);
```

If your code itself contains a run of backticks, open the fence with more backticks than the longest run inside it.

Mermaid diagrams

Use a mermaid fence:

```mermaid
graph TD
  A[Write] --> B[Preview]
  B --> C[Export]
```

Diagrams render in the preview and in exports. They are drawn on your device — nothing is sent to a diagram service.

Maths with KaTeX

Inline maths goes between single dollars, display maths between double:

Euler: $e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$

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

KaTeX only loads for documents that actually contain maths, so it costs nothing on documents that do not.

Footnotes

A claim that needs support.[^1]

[^1]: The support.

GitHub alerts

> [!NOTE]
> Useful context.

> [!TIP]
> A better way to do it.

> [!IMPORTANT]
> Do not miss this.

> [!WARNING]
> Careful.

> [!CAUTION]
> Risk of damage.

Frontmatter

A --- block at the very top of a document is metadata, not prose. markbird keeps it out of the preview and out of every export, and uses it for tags and aliases:

---
tags: [handbook, markdown]
aliases: [Syntax reference]
---

See Knowledge base for what markbird does with it.

[[Another note]] links documents by title. This is markbird's own extension to Markdown, covered in Knowledge base.

HTML

Inline HTML is allowed but sanitized: scripts, event handlers and javascript: URLs are stripped before rendering. That applies to documents you open from anywhere, so a shared link cannot run code in your browser.