Github Readme Markdown Cheat Sheet

The best way to learn is to use a cheat sheet and write your Markdown document. You can update your README.md on GitHub, and you can get a lot of support from your editors’ built-in functions. As a side note, GitHub also supports emojis which you can add to your document. You can use the cheat sheet to find which ones they are.

Markdown is a lightweight and easy-to-use syntax for styling all forms of writing on the GitHub platform.

What you will learn:

• How the Markdown format makes styled collaborative editing easy
• How Markdown differs from traditional formatting approaches
• How to use Markdown to format text
• How to leverage GitHub’s automatic Markdown rendering
• How to apply GitHub’s unique Markdown extensions

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *.

1. How to add animated GIFs to your GitHub README. How to enhance GitHub README with animated SVG. How to add badges in a GitHub repository. How to display GitHub contributors in README. How to Markdown using Visual Studio Code. How to write a good README for your GitHub project. Try using this Markdown Cheat Sheet guide for your next README.md file.
2. Shown below is a sample webpage using one of GitHub’s pre-made themes. Confusingly, GitHub Pages renders Markdown differently than GitHub does. GitHub uses its own Markdown processor; GitHub Pages uses kramdown. This means your README.md file will look different on GitHub’s website than on your GitHub Pages website. For example, emoji are.

You can use Markdown most places around GitHub:

• Comments in Issues and Pull Requests
• Files with the .md or .markdown extension

For more information, see “Writing on GitHub” in the GitHub Help.

Examples

Syntax guide

Here’s an overview of Markdown syntax that you can use anywhere on GitHub.com or in your own text files.

Headers

Emphasis

Lists

Unordered

Python Markdown Cheat Sheet

Ordered

Images

Links

Blockquotes

Inline code

GitHub Flavored Markdown

GitHub.com uses its own version of the Markdown syntax that provides an additional set of useful features, many of which make it easier to work with content on GitHub.com.

Note that some features of GitHub Flavored Markdown are only available in the descriptions and comments of Issues and Pull Requests. These include @mentions as well as references to SHA-1 hashes, Issues, and Pull Requests. Task Lists are also available in Gist comments and in Gist Markdown files.

Syntax highlighting

Here’s an example of how you can use syntax highlighting with GitHub Flavored Markdown:

You can also simply indent your code by four spaces:

Here’s an example of Python code without syntax highlighting:

Task Lists

If you include a task list in the first comment of an Issue, you will get a handy progress indicator in your issue list. It also works in Pull Requests!

Tables

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens - (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe |:

Would become:

Github Readme Markdown Cheat Sheet 2020

SHA references

Any reference to a commit’s SHA-1 hash will be automatically converted into a link to that commit on GitHub.

Issue references within a repository

Any number that refers to an Issue or Pull Request will be automatically converted into a link.

Username @mentions

Typing an @ symbol, followed by a username, will notify that person to come and view the comment. This is called an “@mention”, because you’re mentioning the individual. You can also @mention teams within an organization.

Automatic linking for URLs

Github Markdown Syntax

Any URL (like http://www.github.com/) will be automatically converted into a clickable link.

Github Markdown Guide

Strikethrough

Any word wrapped with two tildes (like ~~this~~) will appear crossed out.

Emoji

GitHub supports emoji!

To see a list of every image we support, check out the Emoji Cheat Sheet.

Last updated Jan 15, 2014