On RST

Learnt about RST markup last night. And if you’ve forgotten what markup is, read this.

Easy to learn, easy to use. Feels like a superset of Markdown, which I’m using to write this note. A fitting analogy, methinks, would be a supercharged text editor vs an IDE.

First doubt I had was, where’d I use it? Markdown’s already pretty handy. And then I realised, I should use the right tool for the right job. While Markdown’s pretty nifty at writing, there’d be times where I’d need to go beyond what it can do.

The first thing that came to mind, was documentation for software projects, which I help out with, quite a bit now. That’d require a more fully featured, pretty formalised way of writing Markdown, if lots of people, using lots of different systems were to use it. So, a better idea’d be to let Markdown be Markdown, and use something else, better suited.

And that’s where RST comes in. Formal, Featured, Extensible, Easy.

Here’s a quickstart primer. And I found this dingus to practice with. Pretty handy.