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Is there an official file extension for standalone Markdown files?

Beat Rupp
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7 Answers7

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There is no requirement for a Markdown file extension. However to ensure editors or parsers recognise a file is Markdown-formatted, one of the following extensions would be checked for:

.md
.mkd
.mdwn
.mdown
.mdtxt
.mdtext
.markdown
.text

There are websites such as GitHub that use subset of these extensions when converting to HTML so developers will conform to their standard.

Examples of extension usage:

GitHub: .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .mkd, .mdwn, .md (source)

Vim markdown: .markdown, .mdown, .mkdn, .mdwn, .mkd, .md (vim-m-src)

Bitbucket: .md, .mkd, .mkdn, .mdown, .markdown, .text (source)

Further Reading

The Markdown mailing list has interesting discussions about this topic: 1, 2, such as this snippet:

Markdown isn't meant to take over the format of a file, it's a way to subtly add information to the plaintext. Really, the presence of Markdown is metadata, not a file format.

No one opening a text file will be confused if they find Markdown syntax, it's pure bonus. In this sense, it makes sense to use ".text", ".txt", or whatever other plaintext extension is relevant.

An editor which knows nothing about Markdown won't care about the metadata and won't be confused by the variety of "non-standard" extensions, but will display and edit the plaintext just fine.

Cas
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17

The idea of MarkDown and similar light-weight markups is to be readable as plain text, thus they have text/plain extension (.txt or .text).

However, there are some people who use .markdown or .mdown.

vartec
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4

iA Writer uses the extension .md for Markdown content.

Subhash Chandran
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4

Doxygen added Markdown support in v1.8. It looks for .md or .markdown file extensions.

albert
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Andy Dent
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3

I'm not aware of one, but I think a precedent is set by the use of the .text extension on the official website to reveal the Markdown that produces the pages.

Dennis Williamson
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1

In short, the answer is no.

If you are simply using markdown files as stand-alone files that will not be processed in any way, name them however you please. If you are using them in a system the processes them into HTML or PDF or some other format, then you need to figure out what file extensions that system expects for markdown files.

Also, in the context of a UNIX system, file extensions are not even mandatory. You could simply have a file called "README" in markdown format.

Ryan C. Thompson
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0

Hmm... Geany, the open source IDE, when saving a Markdown formatted file, uses the .mdml extension. Strange that it seems to be the only one...

User203040
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