Markdown Commands & Editing Shortcuts

Welcome to our lesson on editing shortcuts!

Here, I’ll briefly cover some useful shortcuts for text editing in Notion. There’s absolutely no need to learn all of them now, feel free to treat this lesson as a resource to come back to.

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Standard shortcuts

There are a bunch of standard keyboard shortcuts that are common across all text editors. Think of your usual stuff, like Cmd/Ctrl + B for Bold, or Cmd/Ctrl + I for Italics.

Some useful editing shortcuts:

• Press enter to insert a line of text.
• Press shift + enter to create a line break within a block of text.
• Press cmd/ctrl + shift + M to create a comment.
• Type -- to create a divider. (Three dashes in a row.)
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + B to bold text.
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + I to italicize text.
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + U to underline text.
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + shift + S for strikethrough.
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + K to add a link. You can also paste a URL over selected text to turn it into a link using cmd/ctrl + V.
• With text selected, press cmd/ctrl + E for inline code.
• Press tab to indent and nest content. Whenever you indent, you’re nesting that block inside the block above it. If you select the parent, everything nested under it will also be selected.
• Press shift + tab to un-nest content.
• Type /turn at the beginning or end of a block to turn it into a different type of block. You’ll see a list of choices pop up.
• Type /color at the beginning or end of any text block to change its color or highlight color. (To remove a color or highlight, just type /default.) Example: /blue, /blue background

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Markdown shortcuts

Notion also supports Markdown — a common text formatting language popular with programmers and people working in tech. Lately, markdown has become more popular even outside those circles, so if you already know some markdown or want to learn some, Notion is a great tool for that.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about Markdown, here’s a great video → [Markdown explainer video, to find and link]

While typing:

• Type * on both sides of your text to bold.
• Type  on both sides of your text to italicize.
• Type on both sides of your text to create inline code`. (That’s the symbol to the left of your 1 key.)
• Type ~ on both sides of your text to strikethrough.

At the beginning of any new line or existing block of content, try these:

• Type , , or + followed by space to create a bulleted list.
• Type [] to create a to-do checkbox, followed by space. (There’s no space in between.)
• Type 1., a., or i. followed by space to create a numbered list.
• Type # followed by space to create an H1 heading.
• Type ## followed by space to create an H2 sub-heading.
• Type ### followed by space to create an H3 sub-heading.
• Type > followed by space to create a toggle list.
• Type " followed by space to create a quote block.