The mode provides syntax highlighting, and keyboard shortcuts for editing, compiling, and previewing Markdown. It has general support for various markdown flavours, supports Markdown 1.0 and CommonMark, and includes a special GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown) major mode.

Out of the box, markdown-mode will use markdown, discount, or libtext-markdown-perl for HTML preview and export by calling /usr/bin/markdown. Please note that they produce slightly different results (eg: apostrophes exported as " ' " vs " ’ "), and they may handle digressions from the CommonMark specification in different ways—for example in what is identified as a sublist rather than a subsequent list item.

If "defcustom markdown-command" is customised it can also be made to work with pandoc, libtext-multimarkdown-perl, or python3-markdown. Using pandoc will also unlock various other configuration options. See README.md and customize-mode for details.