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.”

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.

Switching to Markdown on Reddit.com

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. For a deep dive into Reddit’s Markdown support, see this wiki article.

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 Yes 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 is not supported.
Footnotes No
Heading IDs Partial Automatically generated. There's no way to set custom heading IDs.
Definition Lists No
Strikethrough Yes
Task Lists No
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!<
Superscript The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to ^reddit and be ^(reddited here) in return. The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to reddit and be reddited here in return.

See Also

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