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Using markdown in Jira

Nikolaj Ivancic

After several intense years spent on Open Source projects in GitHub, I am returning to Jira (a consulting job for a customer that uses Jira everywhere) with the desire to use markdown everywhere possible (certainly in all Jira forms/fields as well as wikis). Looking around, I found several articles like this one, that are very detailed and not necessarily current.

Can someone point me to a less complicated document that would provide me with the easy way to set all renderers to markdown. At the same time, if "forcing" markdown into Jira world is unwise, please tell me why

Accepted answers

All comments

Daniel Eads

Hi Nikolaj,

We're in a bit of a transition phase with our editors right now. Things to vary a bit by product at the moment.

Confluence Cloud: Markdown is supported

Confluence Server: Out of the box, Confluence Server has some other shortcuts to do formatting but they're not necessarily markdown-syntax. There is "real" markdown support using one of several markdown apps from the Marketplace.

Jira Cloud: Support is about half and half at the moment. Places that have been ported over (mostly just looking at issues on boards at the moment) do support markdown. The "old" issue view does not currently. Right now you can tell by looking for the little Preview and "?" icons near the button to submit your comment. If there's no Preview/"?" buttons, then there is Markdown support for issue descriptions/comments in Jira Cloud.

Jira Server: On most Jira installations*, Wiki Rendering is enabled for Description and Comment fields. You can read more about the field renderers here which you may have already come across - it's also linked to in the document you listed. The Wiki Renderer uses a markdown-similar format although it's not really markdown. For example, *asterisks* around a word make it bold in Jira's wiki renderer instead of italic like Markdown specifies. On Jira 7.3 and above, you also get a Visual editor that gives you WYSIWYG if you like - you can flip between that and the Text mode which just shows you the Wiki rendering syntax by clicking the corresponding tabs at the bottom of the description/comment fields.

*if the Jira install is very old (Jira 5 or older) and has been upgraded, someone would have needed to change the field renderer to enable wiki rendering. The old versions used the Default Text Renderer for Description and Comment fields by default and this behavior wasn't overridden on upgrades.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Daniel

Nikolaj Ivancic

Thank you, Daniel, for such comprehensive answer, which should, by the way, be prominently displayed at all relevant places. The situation you described is creating me a problem - and I am quite sure Atlassian team feels the same.

Based on your description above, I did a few tests, which warrant the subsequent question (note that I am currently dealing with Jira and Confluence Cloud versions):

What is your definition of the term "supporting markdown"?

I tried a simple test in the comment field of a Jira issue - create a "Heading 1" line by typing the `#` character followed by a space. The editor immediately interpreted this, by deleting the `#` character and increasing the font size accordingly. I find this very confusing, as I was expecting to stay in the "markdown text entry mode" until asking for a preview or saving my text.

Then, I tried to create the markdown link - [text to display](link url) - this clearly does not work as shown below:

markdown sample.png

Note the above screenshot represents the content of a Jira/Cloud comment on an issue (as different from being made in this editor I am using to type this text now)

Sergei Ryabkov

Here is more info on the new editor: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracorecloud/the-new-jira-issue-view-938040503.html?_ga=2.70052880.1462470402.1547742094-582225571.1540237083#ThenewJiraissueview-NewAtlassianeditor

Former user

Hi @Daniel Eads - where can we track the progress on the rollout? We're on JIRA cloud and the team is extremely excited about getting Markdown support :-).