Support Markdown syntax

[felixarntz]

Issue Overview

At the moment, when writing a very simple post (regular text content only) in Gutenberg, the user is required to use the mouse for things like inserting headings, links, formatting text in bold/italic etc. While Gutenberg is optimized for supporting creation of complex layouts, it should be as easy and streamlined as possible to write a basic post with text content. Only having to use the keyboard would make that much quicker.

Possible Solution

If Gutenberg supported the Markdown specification, that would be possible. The current WordPress editor at least supports a subset of it, but I think Gutenberg should support much more of it. If users could simply write ## My Heading and make that a heading block automatically, it would make the process of writing a post much quicker. Same applies of course for the other things, like formatting text or maybe even adding links.

@schlessera highlighted recently that Dropbox Paper has that kind of support for Markdown, and when I tested it, I loved it. Please try it to get an idea of my suggestion.

[westonruter]

Support for text patterns is being worked on in #1674. I imagine that could be extended to support headings.

[pento]

Core's textpatterns already support headings, so I assume it will be part of #1674.

-1000 on full Markdown support, that should be a plugin. It's far too niche, and a maintenance nightmare to make sense of the various Markdown parsing libraries.

[ntwb]

No WordPress Flavoured Markdown then 🤔

[felixarntz]

@pento Right, I probably went over the top with supporting "the Markdown specification". Headings and links in addition to the current stuff (bold, italic, code...) would be very beneficial though.

I wasn't aware of #1674, I'll leave a comment there too.

[mtias]

The basic markdown-like patterns are implemented.

[terrylinooo]

Maybe you can consider the Markdown editor plugin.