When our community members want to provide instructions within a repl, the most common pattern we've seen is in a .txt file, or as a code comment. Users quickly figured out that while they could make markdown files, there was no way to render it in a more readable format. Today, that changes. We're happy to announce that you can now preview markdown in repls!

How to get Markdown Previews

It's really simple to use - simply create a markdown file (a file with an .md extension) and viola - you'll see a button to edit and preview in the top right corner of the editor.

Feel free to edit your markdown file, and toggle back and forth between preview mode and edit mode as much as you like!

Opening a markdown file will show the preview by default, so you can use this as a README for your repl, or to provide special instructions.

Features

Aside from being able to preview markdown, we also support full syntax highlighting for code blocks. It will be highlighted in the same theme as the editor itself.

You can also copy code blocks by clicking on the copy icon in the top-right corner of code blocks.

We have ideas for more features, but we'd also like to hear from you. Read on for more!

Next Steps

Right now, markdown previews are only supported on Monaco, which we use for non-mobile platforms. Mobile support is coming soon.

Since it's built right into the editor, we have ambitious ideas for how it can be better integrated with the rest of the Repl.it experience. One such example of a feature we want to see is the ability to import a code block directly into a file. This would be especially helpful for using markdown as tutorial instructions.

We'd also like for files named README.md to be the default selected file, if it exists, so users landing on your repl will see your README first.

Got more ideas for us? We'd love to hear them over on our feedback channels!