Every respectable software project needs a README. This file provides crucial information about what the project is, how to work with it, and other relevant information for developers. README files are written in markdown, a special markup syntax. The syntax for markdown is simple enough, but it can be a pain to manually type out, and it’s easy to make simple mistakes and typos.

Wouldn’t you like to just use the Cmd+B keyboard shortcut to bold some text instead of typing ** around your text? Or what about creating a nicely formatted table in your README, especially when editing an existing table? Wouldn’t it be nice if the table formatting and column width adjustments were taken care of for us? Markdown is wonderful, but it’s not exactly as easy as working with a Google doc when applying formatting.