Real, actual Markdown support is arriving in Google Docs, not a moment too soon

Enlarge / In goes the sensible characters, out goes a document for which you almost always have to adjust the sharing permissions. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The best time to truly implement the Markdown markup language into Google Docs was when Google Docs was in the early 2010s, but yesterday was a pretty good time, too.

Google Docs conjoined features from the acquisitions of related software companies (Writely, DocVerse, and QuickOffice) and had jammed them all together into Drive by 2012. By that point, Markdown, a project of web writer John Gruber with input from data activist Aaron Swartz, had been solidified and gathering steam for about eight years. Then, for another decade or so, writing in Markdown and writing in Google Docs were two different things, joined together only through browser extensions or onerous import/export tools. An uncountable number of cloud-syncing, collaboration-friendly but Markdown-focused writing tools flourished in that chasm.

In early 2022, the first connecting plank was placed: Docs could “Automatically detect Markdown,” if you enabled it. This expanded the cursory support for numbered and unordered lists and checkboxes to the big items, like headlines, italics, bold, strikethrough, and links. You could write in Markdown in Docs, but you could not paste, nor could you import or export between Docs and Markdown styling.