Markdown cheat sheet for shared notes

LiveNote’s editor has four modes. Rich text is the default and needs no syntax at all. Markdown mode is there for when you would rather type the structure than click it, which is faster once your fingers know the symbols. This is the subset that is worth memorizing.

The eight that matter

The three worth learning properly

These take ten seconds to learn and pay for themselves immediately.

• Fenced code blocks. Three backticks on their own line, then your code, then three backticks. Everything between is literal, so indentation and asterisks survive. This is how you paste a stack trace without it turning into a mess of formatting.
• Links. Square brackets for the text, parentheses for the address: [the docs](https://example.com). Paste the URL and most editors turn it into a link on its own.
• Horizontal rules. Three dashes on their own line give you a clean divider, which is useful for separating meeting sections in one long page.

## Sync failure at 14:02

> Reported by the on-call rota, not yet reproduced.

The client fell back to polling:

1. `ws.close()` fired without a code
2. Reconnect loop retried 3 times at 2s intervals
3. Fell back to 5s polling

```text
14:02:11 WS  closed code=1006
14:02:13 RETRY 1/3
14:02:15 RETRY 2/3
14:02:17 RETRY 3/3
14:02:17 POLL every 5s
```

See [the reconnect notes](https://example.com/reconnect) for the backoff table.

Escaping the characters that bite you

Markdown reads punctuation as instructions, which means text that is genuinely about Markdown needs escaping. A backslash before the character tells the editor to treat it literally.

• \*not italic\* renders as literal asterisks.
• \# not a heading renders as a literal hash.
• \not code\`` renders as literal backticks.

This matters more than it sounds when you are pasting a log file or writing documentation about Markdown, which is exactly the kind of note people share.

When to skip Markdown entirely

If you are writing prose, pasting something you did not write, or working on a phone, the rich text editor is faster. It needs no symbols, it cannot produce a broken fence, and paste from a webpage arrives as formatted text instead of a wall of raw HTML. Markdown earns its keep on structured, technical, or keyboard-first writing. Anywhere else it is a tax you do not need to pay.

The modes are interchangeable, so nothing is lost by starting in one and switching. A note keeps the mode you last saved it in.