I came here to post exactly that same tip. 
I find this to be a handy and natural way to think of Markdown links (and I suppose it was consciously designed that way)
[Button](https://www.LinkToWebsiteFromButton.com)
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I develop and customize content management systems and we’ve found that markdown fields usually work better than WYSIWYG fields because markdown sets the right expectation for the user that the template is going to handle the presentation. Providing something that feels like Word, even with limited buttons, results in users trying to do too much with it.
I’m not a writer, with most of what I do write going on a presentation or the notes and the rich text in Keynote is the way to go there. Markdown is not for me really.
But, the fact that web services and text editors can provide simple formatting that I can use without effort is brilliant. I also use the syntax in emails sometimes because underscores either side of a word provide stress elegantly; they slow the reader just the right amount.
So, I love Markdown even though I use it rarely.
I loved this episode. I’ve been using Markdown since I bought David’s (and Eddie Smith’s) original Field Guide.
Drafts and 1Writer are my current two Markdown apps of choice. I use 1Writer for long-form fiction writing and I use Drafts for everything else (Emails, Texts, Notes, etc.). Drafts works on iOS and macOS and the sync is super-fast and reliable. 1Writer (iOS) saves individual plain text files to iCloud so that many Mac apps can access/edit them from there. If pushed, I could make do with Drafts alone, especially since the addition of the simple but powerful hyperlinking between drafts (using a Markdown-like syntax based on [[Double Square Brackets]].
On a future note, I hope we’re not too far away from seeing the fruits of the labour from Brett Terpstra and Fletcher Penney, who have been working on a replacement for Multi-Markdown Composer and nvAlt. I can’t think of two greater experts in this field, but the project is a long time coming. See this Blog Post from last year.
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Oops, that went in a direction I wasn’t expecting. My comment wasn’t intended to cause annoyance so if it did then I apologise.
My point is wider than being able to style printed output in Marked 2 (which I would completely accept as being niche and isn’t my requirement anyway).
My use case is to create Markdown content (preferably in iA Writer on iPad) and then publish that content via a variety of channels including web, email and print, applying suitable formatting to each (I only highlighted print as it is often the trickiest). This is something that Markdown should be well suited for with its focus on content first and presentation later.
My observation is that with the current crop of Markdown tools, the options for tailoring the output seem to go straight from…
“Pick a template you like”, with little or no customisation.
to…
“Adapt a relatively chunky piece of CSS”, which offers great flexibility, but with a reasonably significant learning curve and lots of stumbling blocks waiting to trip up the unwary. This can easily turn into a significant time suck, which I think many people (myself included) would prefer to avoid when they are trying to focus on their content.
So all I was trying to express was my wish for a middle ground that offered a relatively simple customisation interface (e.g. the inspectors you get in Pages) that could then generate the output templates without the need to delve into the CSS code. In my book at least, this would be in line with the spirit of what Markdown was originally designed to achieve.
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Until i read through this thread and find out that somebody already mentioned this:
Paragraphs have been at least for me the biggest mystery with markdown.
My feeling is there’s a lot of variation and inconsistencies between apps and md styles/flavors when it comes to
paragraphs, breaks, line breaks, nbsp, double spaces, and more.
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The keyboard shortcut ⌥ ⌘ P should give you the formatted preview.
it works on iOS and macOS
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Stephen mentioned Markdown Tables generator - TablesGenerator.com which is pretty cool (and a site that I didn’t know about) but I also wanted to add that I use and love TableFlip.
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Great news! That’ll be top of my listening list on Monday morning. 
Interesting history of Markdown from John Gruber, its main inventor, on this podcast, https://writingandbreathing.com/episodes/14 beginning at 1:07:29.
Gruber says he wrote it to simplify writing in HTML. When you’re writing in HTML it’s too easy to leave off an angle-bracket or something and mess up your whole page. Markdown is designed to make that process more breakproof, and also make writing easier (less typing) and make the result easier to read.
A friend recently said that Markdown is kind of like a cult. I agree it can be, but to me it’s just a simple, but very useful shortcut for getting words down easy and quickly.
The whole podcast is worth listening to if you’re a fan of Gruber, as I am, and enjoy hearing about his writing process, which I do enjoy.
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I started straight away. I am amazed it never occurred to me to do that before.
Good point but I took up David’s suggestion straight away as it seemed easier frankly and is applicable in every place I use Markdown, which is three I think at present. I write everything I do initially in a Markdown app now. Even if I don’t use any markdown as such.
I tried it but it did not work for me. The comments didn’t pop. I suppose I could play with stylesheets at some point.
I’ve been using boldface for comments. I rarely use boldface otherwise so it works out. I like the way ia Writer and Ulysses have created separate syntaxes for comments, but alas I no longer use those apps.
I don’t write blogs or web stuff either. I find it most useful for long-form writing, especially when you’re incorporating a bunch of different formatting styles and contents. For example, in my academic writing, I often have to include citations, figures, tables, captions, and different heading levels. I use Scrivener combined with multimarkdown (Pandoc flavour) to sort out all the formatting for me on export and do things like auto-numbering and building my reference list for me. You could technically do this in something like Word, but I find it much more cumbersome.
I agree it’s probably overkill for short form (emails or anything less than a few hundred words), but there’s lots of power for longer form or complex writing tasks. It’s also handy if you plan to export to multiple formats simultaneously. Markdown can be used as a generic format that can then me converted to other formats as desired, which again, is likely overkill for a lot of people.
Here’s a use case that hasn’t been discussed:
At my company, we use an online database meant specifically for recruiting firms, and in it we have hundreds of thousands of records that can only be saved as plain text. This is why I took David’s suggestion years ago. I write my notes in a markdown app that supports live formatting, like Drafts, and then cut and paste it into our database. The markdown formatting goes in as plain text. Yes, the # marks probably annoy other people at the company, but the data is easy to read. If I ever need any old data, I can copy it from the plain-text field and paste it back into any of my markdown apps, and bam I have formatted data again!
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Like you, I was a Word guy, because I don’t publish anything to the web. But that changed for me as I started using my iPad and iPhone more and more. I have always hated the laborious process of trying to quickly reference text or make a very, very small change to a Word document on my iOS device. It has always felt like getting in my car to drive to my next-door neighbor, and having to find a parking spot 20 feet from where I left.
Doing the same thing through a markdown doc via IA Writer or 1Writer is a game-changer. I can get in and out of a markdown doc before I have forgotten why I was opening it in the first place!
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I’ve used Typora for a long time. I mostly use VS Code these days, even though I’m a retired non-programmer, mainly for its Github and syntax highlighting extensions. But I’ve not found any good inline preview extensions.
TIL - Drafts app has inline MD preview!?!? How did I not know this? 
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