Reddit Markdown Editor

What is the Reddit Markdown Editor?

The Reddit Markdown Editor is a free tool for writing a Reddit post or comment in markdown with a live preview beside it. It renders bold, italics, strikethrough, spoilers, superscript, quotes, lists, tables, code and links the way Reddit does, including how Reddit joins lines that sit next to each other.

How to use the Reddit Markdown Editor

1. Type or paste your post into Markdown, or press Load sample to see every format at once.
2. Select some text and use the toolbar to make it bold, italic, struck through, a spoiler, code or a link. Heading, Quote and List mark whole lines.
3. Read the Preview as you type. It shows the post the way Reddit will render it.
4. Check the counts under the editor against Reddit's limits: 40,000 characters for a post and 10,000 for a comment.
5. Press Copy markdown and paste it into Reddit's editor in Markdown Mode.

Reddit formatting cheat sheet

Bold is two asterisks either side, **like this**, and italics is one, *like this*. Strikethrough is two tildes, ~~like this~~. Superscript is a caret before a word, ^like, or before a phrase in brackets, ^(like this). Inline code goes between backticks. A link is the text in square brackets followed by the address in round ones: [hyperank](https://hyperank.ai). A bare web address becomes a link on its own, and so do r/subreddit and u/username.

For whole lines: a heading starts with one to six # signs, a quote starts with >, a bulleted list starts each line with - or *, and a numbered list with 1.. Three dashes on a line of their own, ---, draw a horizontal rule. A spoiler goes between >! and !< and stays hidden until someone taps it.

Every one of these is in the sample, so the quickest way to learn one is to press Load sample and change it.

Why do my line breaks disappear on Reddit?

Because Reddit's markdown treats a single line break as a space. Two lines that sit next to each other are joined into one paragraph when the post is shown, which is why a carefully spaced list of thoughts arrives as one long block. This is the most common reason a post looks different on Reddit from how it looked while you wrote it.

To start a new paragraph, leave a blank line. To break a line without starting a new paragraph, end it with two spaces or a backslash. The preview here follows the same rule, so a line that runs into the next one in the preview will run into it on Reddit too.

Lists and quotes follow the same logic: every item needs its own line starting with its marker, and a blank line ends the list or quote.

How to make a code block or a table on Reddit

For a code block, indent every line by four spaces. That works on new Reddit, old Reddit and the apps. Three backticks on the lines above and below also make a code block on new Reddit, but old Reddit shows the backticks as text, so four spaces is the safer choice if your readers use both.

A table is a header row of cells split by pipes, then a divider row of dashes, then one row per line: | Name | Upvotes |, then |---|---|, then | r/SaaS | 212 |. Colons in the divider set the alignment: :-- for left, --: for right and :-: for centred. Every row needs the same number of cells, or the table breaks.

What Reddit markdown does not support

There is no underline, no text colour, no font size other than headings, and no HTML: tags are shown as plain text. Images cannot be placed inside markdown text either. On new Reddit you can add images to a text post through the rich text editor where a subreddit allows it, but a markdown image link only shows as a link.

If you paste markdown into the rich text editor instead of Markdown Mode, the asterisks and brackets show up as plain characters. Switch the editor to Markdown Mode first, then paste. Old Reddit and most Reddit apps read the same markdown, so a post written this way looks the same across them, apart from the backtick code blocks above.