lightdown

A minimalistic, safe, and chat oriented, markdown-ish utility.

• around 0.6K
• compatible with ES3+ (every engine, every browser)
• code is always 100% preserved
• links are preserved but shown with a maximum length

Live Demo

Different from Markdown

The main, and most important, difference from markdown is that the single biggest source of inspiration for lightdown's syntax is the format of chat messages, tweets, or even SMS.

The reason is a less empowering layout, without images, or hidden links, with full expressiveness preserved, including bullet lists created one line per time.

Lightdown VS HTML

While produced output contains safe HTML, bear in mind lightdown does not do any extra input sanitization: what goes in, goes out.

If you want to be sure your text is 100% HTML safe, replace < and > to avoid surprises.

const lightdown = require('lightdown');

// safely inject the result
element.innerHTML = lightdown(
  text.replace(/[<>]/g, m => ({'<':'&lt;', '>':'&gt;'}[m]))
);

Lightdown: Syntax

• single * for emphasis, more ** for strong
• single _ for emphasis, more __ for underscore
• one or more ~ for striking through
• double "quotes" for proper “quotes”
• single tick ` for inline code
• multiple ticks for multi line code. If there is a programming language name right after ticks it will be used as code class.
• start a line with a *, surrounded by one or more spaces, to convert that * into a bullet •
• all links are shown inline with a max length, still fully preserving their original URL