Microsoft Visual Studio now has a built-in Markdown editor that can modify and preview .md files directly.

CTOnews.com, December 28, Markdown is a lightweight markup language. Markdown is a good solution when developers want to format code without sacrificing readability. For example, GitHub uses Markdown to display explanatory documents, that is, .md files.

Microsoft recently announced the introduction of a Markdown editor into Visual Studio based on feedback from developers. In a recent preview of Visual Studio 17. 5, Microsoft introduced Markdown editing to IDE. Now, when developers have to make changes to the Markdown file in the project, they don't have to leave Visual Studio to do so.

As can be seen from the official demo, developers can edit the Markdown file in Visual Studio while previewing the editing effect on the right.

CTOnews.com learned that the Markdown editor in Visual Studio provides the following advantages:

Support syntax highlighting for easy parsing

Decorators such as delete lines and bold can be applied directly in the editor

Preview window showing the appearance of the rendered HTML: the Shift+F7 shortcut key brings up the preview on the right side of the editor. There is also a button in the upper-left corner of the editor to turn the preview on and off.

In addition, most of the standard controls in the user-familiar Visual Studio editor also apply to the Markdown editor. For example, try using the Shift+Alt + down arrow to create multiple inserts and quickly modify the bulleted list.

The Markdown editor will also support the spell checker, which will soon be launched in Visual Studio.