Confused by Markdown support

The only Markdown support I’m seeing is for automatic list, beginning a list item with - then pressing return. I’m not able to apply any formatting, such as bold, italic, etc. What am I missing?

Drafts formatting is generally done via actions. The app ships with a set of Markdown actions in a Markdown action group, which can be selected in the action list (right pane) or used as an extended keyboard row. This is not the default keyboard row, so you might need to change your selected row to see these commands (details in link above).

This Markdown action group has examples for bold, italics, links, list formatting, headers and showing previews. Many other Markdown-related actions are also available and can be installed from the Action Directory.

Oops, just realized this was in the Mac topic. Per the above, formatting is done with actions and actions are not yet available in the Mac version. They will be coming later this year.

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Hey, I really like Drafts but I can’t believe the Mac version doesn’t support even simple Markdown formatting shortcuts yet (command+b for bold for instance).

For me, a text editor is almost unusable without. I have to return to Ulysses but I’ll keep an eye on Drafts’ further development. Thanks.

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Remember / note a lot of these rely on actions - which are coming soon.

On a practical note, can you get far with editing on iOS and reading on Mac?

Or also note that syntax for things like bold is very simple. (I wrote the previous sentence without using keyboard shortcuts and - so long as you can find the * key - it is quite easy.)

Having said that, keyboard shortcuts will be nice.

Markdown syntax is pretty simple to be able to use, and worth learning. It’s valuable being able to take it to a dedicated text editor (like BBEdit, Atom, or SublimeText), use it on the sites that support it (Classic Reddit, GitHub, Discourse forums, StackExchange) and use it more dexterously without having to use keyboard shortcuts that often are slower (by requiring you to go back and select the text you want to surround with asterisks for example) or don’t have the complete customization (e.g. language selection for syntax highlighting in code blocks).

If you’re coming from Ulysses, some of the unique syntax of that app will slow you down, but I think it’s a long-term win to familiarize yourself with writing the syntax without shortcuts.

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