markdownlint VS markdownlint

markdownlint is a node.js markdown linter that is easy to install and easy to customize. It is based on an earlier Ruby tool, also called markdownlint. Both are great, but the Node.js tool is easy to install and easy to customize.

An example of where this can be convenient is when you want to use an external program or project that uses a language that isn't supported by your project. For example, the build process for this blog's content uses Node.js, but consider the case where I wanted to use a Markdown linter defined in Ruby, such as Markdownlint. One option is to add a Ruby installation directly to the definition of the build environment, but this has a few disadvantages:

While the summary, walkthrough, and disregard for best practices were unsatisfying, one unexpected benefit emerged: the integration of linting feedback directly within the pull request comments. It provided nitpicks from linting tools (in this case markdownlint. On one side, it is very disappointing to see that the AI agent did nothing more than lint the code and generate a nice comment out of the output. On the other hand it is quite nice that it introduces "quality gates" such as linting without me having to write a pipeline for it. Moreover, producing easily digestible output from a linter is nothing to be underestimated. The quality of life of having this directly as a comment rather than having to go through pipeline logs to read the raw linter output is quite nice. Is it worth two dozen USD per month? No, definitely not!

Since the maintainer mentioned it was a copy-paste job, I went looking for the existing release notes. I figured the first place to look would be the releases on GitHub and found them right away. I did make some adjustments such as removing the GitHub changelogs and any references to them, since the previous release notes didn't include them, although I did notice the previous release notes didn't bother to remove any mentions of the changelogs even though they're absent from the docs. The markdown file was also inconsistently formatted, and links in the GitHub release notes were missing from the ones in the docs. Nevertheless, I figured I should ensure my contribution maintains a high standard, so I used markdownlint for my additions and made sure to move any links over, especially since many of them linked to contributors' GitHub profiles. One of the releases also didn't have any notes at all, but I couldn't just remove it. I also couldn't just have a heading with no body. This release was a release candidate for a minor version and there were several others like it with brief release notes simply stating that they were pre-release builds for the next minor version, so I copied the same format.

There are more linting tools that I won't go into deeply, but you can integrate them with lint-staged. For example, you can lint your CSS content with Stylelint, or even lint your README files with markdownlint, etc.

Some of Djot's features can be achieved by using markdownlint though: https://github.com/DavidAnson/markdownlint

markdownlint - A Node.js style checker and lint tool for Markdown/CommonMark files.

Improvements - The prefer-some-in-iteration rule will by default no longer flag iteration where a sub-attribute is used, like input[_].item - The use-in-operator rule has been extended to include more types of items, leading to better discovery of locations where in should be used - Remove replace directive in go.mod that made hard to integrate Regal as a library - The project now uses markdownlint to ensure consistent formatting of its documentation - The Go API now allows reading custom rules from an fs.FS filesystem

People are always looking for simple projects to learn Rust with, so here's one for anyone who's currently looking. Port markdownlint to Rust. Markdownlint is ~3.3k lines of JavaScript (including the lint implementation themselves!), so I reckon it's pretty doable.

The markdownlint VS Code extension is powered by the Node library of the same name. Its usage is quite similar to ESLint. It has a set of rules that can be configured, errors are highlighted, and you can automatically fix simple errors.

Markdown Lint

There are no compilers in the Flutter project that guarantee to find issues in README.md or CHANGELOG.md files. To remedy this, the Markdownlint plugin provides a set of guidelines to encourage Markdown file standards and uniformity. You can use this extension to check for problems locally and verify the content before publishing it live. Browse the user manual to learn more about rules.