Create a New Markdown File

Let’s create a new Markdown file, as instructed in the github-starter-course. To do this in VS Code, click on the Explorer (top) icon in the Activity Bar. If this was already selected, then clicking will hide the list of files in the repository. Oops. If that happened, click the Explorer icon again to reveal the list of files. But if you already see the list of files (which is just the README.md file and the .git folder), you’re good to go.

To create a new file, right-click on the top-level folder (github-starter-course), and select New File.... In the explorer, you’ll see a blank space where you can type the name of the new file. Call it test_file.md. Adding .md is important because that will cause VS Code to automatically recognize it as a Markdown file.

This will open the new, empty Markdown file in the main editor window of VS Code.

As described in the textbook, Markdown is a simple language for creating rich text out of simple text. It was designed to emulate the basics of HTML for creating web pages, but simpler.

You can see a Markdown cheatsheet here

You can add whatever you want to the Markdown file. If you’re following this book as part of a course, the README.md file in the repository should have more detailed instructions as to what you should put in this file. Otherwise, just add some text (ideally playing around with Markdown syntax, such as a first-level heading and some boldface text), and save the file.

Practice your good GitHub habits now, by committing and pushing your changes to GitHub in the same way you did in the previous section for README.md.