With Markdown, Reddit text formatting is a breeze. All Reddit users have the option of writing comments and posts in Markdown. The popular news website has developed its own Markdown processor called “snoomark” which is based on GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Some have started referring to this as “Reddit-flavored Markdown.” For a deep dive into Reddit’s Markdown support, see this wiki article.
Enabling Markdown Support
By default, Reddit disables Markdown support for new posts and comments. You can switch from the rich text editor to Markdown by clicking the Switch to markdown link, as shown below.
To permanently save this setting, you can enable the Default to Markdown setting in User Settings > Feed Settings. Enabling that setting will automatically enable Markdown for new posts or comments.
Reddit Markdown Support
Reddit provides support for the following Markdown elements.
| Element | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Headings | Yes | |
| Paragraphs | Yes | |
| Line Breaks | Yes | |
| Bold | Yes | |
| Italic | Yes | |
| Blockquotes | Yes | |
| Ordered Lists | Yes | Lists must start with the number 1. You can use parens as the ending punctuation (i.e., 1) instead of 1.).
|
| Unordered Lists | Partial | Cannot use plus signs (+).
|
| Code | Yes | |
| Horizontal Rules | Yes | |
| Links | Yes | Links can contain spaces. |
| Images | No | Images are only supported in the rich text editor. |
| Tables | Yes | |
| Fenced Code Blocks | Yes | |
| Syntax Highlighting | No | |
| Footnotes | No | |
| Heading IDs | Partial | Automatically generated. There’s no way to set custom heading IDs. |
| Definition Lists | No | |
| Strikethrough | Yes | |
| Task Lists | No | |
| Emoji (copy and paste) | Unknown | |
| Emoji (shortcodes) | Unknown | |
| Highlight | No | |
| Subscript | No | |
| Superscript | Yes | |
| Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
| Disabling Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
| HTML | No |
Support for Additional Syntax Elements
As an added bonus, Reddit provides support for several obscure elements.
| Element | Markdown | Rendered Output |
|---|---|---|
| Spoilers | This text will be hidden: >!spoilers!< |