If there’s one thing nerds like, it’s Markdown, the simplified markup language that converts into HTML. It’s the difference between typing out, for example, <strong>something</strong> (HTML) and __something__ (Markdown)—a fair number of characters, especially over a lot of post authoring.

For writing online content, Markdown is a favorite of Redditors and nerds everywhere for writing richly marked-up text without the wordiness of typing HTML tags by hand.