{"id":240877,"date":"2022-12-21T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2022-12-21T16:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=240877"},"modified":"2023-01-03T13:55:25","modified_gmt":"2023-01-03T21:55:25","slug":"write-markdown-without-leaving-visual-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/write-markdown-without-leaving-visual-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Write markdown without leaving Visual Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Markdown is a great solution when you want formatted code but don\u2019t want to compromise easy readability. GitHub uses it for readme files, and we use it as our standard for Visual Studio documentation. If you\u2019ve contributed to any open-source repo the odds are high that you\u2019ve authored or edited at least one .md file in that repo somewhere.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve heard feedback from developers asking for a markdown editor in Visual Studio. With the recent preview of Visual Studio 17.5, we\u2019ve brought markdown editing to the IDE! Now, when you have to make changes to markdown files in your project, you can do so without ever leaving Visual Studio.<\/p>\n<p><div  class=\"d-flex justify-content-center\"><a class=\"cta_button_link btn-primary mb-24\" href=\"https:\/\/visualstudio.microsoft.com\/vs\/preview\/\" target=\"_blank\">Download Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_240878\" aria-labelledby=\"figcaption_attachment_240878\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" ><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-240878 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS.png\" alt=\"Visual Studio 2022 showing the markdown editing experience. The markdown preview is open on the right.\" width=\"1695\" height=\"1101\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS.png 1695w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS-300x195.png 300w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS-1024x665.png 1024w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS-768x499.png 768w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/Markdown-Full-VS-1536x998.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1695px) 100vw, 1695px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"figcaption_attachment_240878\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Visual Studio 2022 markdown editing experience.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<p>The markdown editor should already be enabled and available if you&#8217;ve updated to the latest 17.5 preview. If you don\u2019t have the new editor, ensure you&#8217;re on the latest preview and that you&#8217;ve checked the \u201cMarkdown language service\u201d preview feature in the Preview Features page of Tools\\Options. If you\u2019re using an extension to edit markdown files today, you may need to bring up the context menu on any file with the .md extension in the solution explorer and choose \u201cOpen With\u2026\u201d. In the Open With dialog, the \u201cVisual Studio Markdown Editor\u201d is the new, built-in editor. You can use this once or set it as the default as you prefer.<\/p>\n<p>Some benefits the markdown editor in Visual Studio provides include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Semantic coloring in the editor for easy parsing.<\/li>\n<li>Adorners like strikethrough and bold are applied right in the editor.<\/li>\n<li>A preview window to show what the rendered HTML will look like: Shift+F7 will bring up the preview on the right side of the editor. There\u2019s also a button at the top left of the editor to open and close the preview.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And perhaps best of all is that most standard controls in the Visual Studio editor you\u2019re already familiar with work in the Markdown editor, too. For instance, try Shift+Alt+Down arrow to create multiple carets and quickly make modifications to a bulleted list.<\/p>\n<p><figure id=\"attachment_240879\" aria-labelledby=\"figcaption_attachment_240879\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" ><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/MultiCursorMarkdown.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-240879 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2022\/12\/MultiCursorMarkdown.gif\" alt=\"The Visual Studio editor demonstrates how to use multiple carets to prepend multiple lines with a dash to convert a list of elements to a bulleted list in markdown.\" width=\"1400\" height=\"488\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"figcaption_attachment_240879\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Using multiple carets to quickly create a bulleted list.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n<p>In addition, Markdown will support the spell checker that will be in an upcoming release of Visual Studio. So stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the new year.<\/p>\n<h2>What do you think?<\/h2>\n<p>We hope the new Markdown editor in Visual Studio will help you save time! And thank you once again for sharing your feedback. We\u2019d love to know what you think of the markdown experience in Visual Studio. Head over to <a href=\"https:\/\/developercommunity.visualstudio.com\/t\/Feedback-on-the-Preview-Markdown-Editing\/10134757\">Developer Community<\/a> to join in on the conversation with us and let us know what improvements you feel would help make the markdown editor even better. Thank you for being an important part of the Visual Studio family!<\/p>\n<p><div  class=\"d-flex justify-content-center\"><a class=\"cta_button_link btn-primary mb-24\" href=\"https:\/\/visualstudio.microsoft.com\/vs\/preview\/\" target=\"_blank\">Download Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 2<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Markdown is a great solution when you want formatted code but don\u2019t want to compromise easy readability. GitHub uses it for readme files, and we use it as our standard for Visual Studio documentation. If you\u2019ve contributed to any open-source repo the odds are high that you\u2019ve authored or edited at least one .md file [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13892,"featured_media":255385,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[6881,526,12,6815],"class_list":["post-240877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visual-studio","tag-markdown","tag-productivity","tag-visual-studio","tag-visual-studio-2022"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Markdown is a great solution when you want formatted code but don\u2019t want to compromise easy readability. GitHub uses it for readme files, and we use it as our standard for Visual Studio documentation. If you\u2019ve contributed to any open-source repo the odds are high that you\u2019ve authored or edited at least one .md file [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13892"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}