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Formatting commands

Formatting commands fix the shape of text rather than its meaning. The usual case is text that arrived from somewhere else - a webpage, a PDF, a chat export - carrying broken line breaks, stray bullets, and inconsistent headings that would take longer to clean by hand than to rewrite.

Commands

To Markdown

Popup⌥T

Convert any text into well-structured, clean Markdown.

Use To Markdown when you have raw notes, meeting dumps, or unformatted text that needs to look polished. It automatically selects the right Markdown elements such as headings, lists, tables, and code blocks to represent your content. Great for turning rough drafts into documentation-ready output.

MarkdownFormattingDocumentation

To Markdown is the one most people set up first. Select messy rich text and get back clean Markdown with proper headings, lists, and code fences, ready to paste into a README, a Notion page, or an issue. It preserves the structure the original was trying to express instead of flattening everything to plain text.

Formatting commands run in replace mode, so the selection is swapped in place. If you would rather review before committing, switch the command to popup mode in its settings.

The usual mistake is reaching for a formatting command when the text needs rewriting. These commands deliberately leave wording alone - if the prose itself needs work, run a writing command first and format afterwards, in that order. Formatting a badly written paragraph produces a well-structured badly written paragraph.

Because formatting is structural rather than interpretive, it is the category where a smaller or local model costs you the least. Converting rich text to Markdown does not require the reasoning that rewriting does, so a model running locally through Ollama handles it about as well as a frontier model - and keeps the document on your machine, which matters if you are formatting something confidential.