I've been using reStructured text in general to write this blog, but I think I'm going to be switching to Markdown. As an experiment, I'm writing this post in Markdown.

I'm also writing it in the Atom text editor, which has really come on a long way since I last tried it. Specifically, it includes a Markdown preview function, so I can see the effects of the markup that I'm writing as I write it.

Mostly, I want a rapid way of creating and publishing code snippets, without the mental overhead of switching between markup languages. Although reStructured text and markdown are broadly similar, there are subtle differences between them when it comes to things like syntax highlighting. But I've discovered today that if I use the triple-backtick syntax, I can get the same output from Pelican, Atom, and IPython notebooks.

So

    ```python
    def syntax(highlighting=True):
        return "cool huh?"
    ```

yields

 def syntax(highlighting=True):
   return "cool huh?"

And if I paste that into a markdown cell in an IPython notebook, I get the same effect, as can be seen here

So this seems to be the general way that the open-source ecosystem is going: Markdown allows me to use the same syntax for my GitHub documentation, my IPython notebooks, and my blog posts.

I do use Sphinx in various places for Python code documentation, so that will still require reStructured text, but elsewhere I think Markdown is the way to go