Install markdown with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• markdown

Project history

The official Daring Fireball page presents Markdown as two things: a plain-text formatting syntax and a Perl software tool that converts that text to HTML. It describes the design goal as making source text readable enough to publish as plain text, with plain-text email named as the largest influence.

The downloadable Markdown 1.0.1 release is dated 17 December 2004. The original tool targeted the weblog tooling of its era, with installation instructions for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit, and required Perl 5.6.0 or later.

Adoption history

Markdown's adoption outgrew the original Perl script and became a durable interchange format for README files, static-site content, issue trackers, package registries, documentation generators, and editor tooling. In this Homebrew package, the shipped executable preserves the original conversion-tool lineage rather than the many later Markdown implementations.

The supplied package facts show distro packaging in Homebrew, Alpine, Debian, Ubuntu, and openSUSE-family packaging via MultiMarkdown, reflecting how the original syntax and tool became part of Unix-like documentation workflows.

How it is used

The original use case is to write readable plain text and convert it to structurally valid HTML. The Daring Fireball page documents weblog integration, text-filter usage in BBEdit, an online Dingus for trying the syntax, and a configuration switch for XHTML-style versus HTML-style empty tags.

Why package nerds care

This package is historically important because it is the source of the Markdown name and reference syntax, not merely one parser among many. Package nerds care about it as a small Perl-era CLI whose influence is vastly larger than its code size.

Timeline

• 2004: Markdown 1.0.1 download dated 17 December 2004 on the official project page.
• 2004: Official documentation describes Markdown as both syntax and a Perl text-to-HTML tool.
• 2026: Supplied package facts show continuing packaging in Homebrew and several Linux distributions.

Related projects

• The official page references SmartyPants as an optional pairing for typographic punctuation in Movable Type.
• The package ecosystem later produced many related implementations and descendants, but this Homebrew formula tracks the original Daring Fireball Markdown tool.

Sources

• https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
• https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
• source_facts.package-manager