GitHub uses what they are calling "GitHub Flavored Markdown" (GFM) for messages, issues, and comments. It differs from standard Markdown (SM) in a few significant ways and adds some additional functionality.
GitHub uses what they are calling "GitHub Flavored Markdown" (GFM) for messages, issues, and comments. It differs from standard Markdown (SM) in a few significant ways and adds some additional functionality.
Newlines
The biggest difference that GFM introduces is in the handling of linebreaks. With SM you can hard wrap paragraphs of text and they will be combined into a single paragraph.
Multiple underscores in words
GFM ignores multiple underscores in words.
URL autolinking
Automatic highlighting of URL's.
Fenced code blocks
Markdown converts text with four spaces at the front of each line to code blocks. GFM supports that, but we also support fenced blocks. Just wrap your code blocks in ``` and you won't need to indent manually to trigger a code block.
Syntax highlighting
They take code blocks a step further and add syntax highlighting if you request it. In your fenced block, add an optional language identifier and we'll run it through syntax highlighting. For example, to syntax highlight Ruby code.
In addition to the changes in the previous section, certain other references are auto-linked, like SHA's.
