As mentioned you can use markdown-mode. To integrate markdown-mode with Stack Overflow you can use the Firefox plugin It's All Text which lets you edit textareas with an external editor. Here is how to set it up:
Install markdown-mode. If you use Debian or Ubuntu you can install it by issuing
sudo apt-get install emacs-goodies-el
or if you're on emacs 24 (or have package.el on emacs 23) and Marmalade or Melpa you can install it with
Alternatively, if as-external-alist is defined—if M-x describe-variable RET as-external-alist doesn't fail—it will probably override your auto-mode-alist. It has a slightly different format (it's a list of pairs instead of a list of cons cells) so this will work:
Press the blue edit button at the bottom right side of a textarea to edit it via emacs. The blue edit button is shown in the following screenshot:
In the following screenshot is an Emacs buffer in markdown-mode editing this post:
When you are done editing in Emacs save the buffer to send it to Firefox.
If you want this functionality for other domains you need to change the regexp above. The following recognizes Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu and Super User:
To use markdow-mode with Org-mode you can use its feature for working with source code. With it you can include blocks of markdown inside your Org-mode buffers which you can edit via markdown-mode. You can use it as follows:
When in an Org-mode buffer enter <s on a newline and press Tab. This will result in
#+begin_src
#+end_src
Enter markdown after #+begin_src so that you have
#+begin_src markdown
#+end_src
When inside the source block (between #+begin_src markdown and #+end_src) press C-c ' to edit the source block with markdown-mode.
Edit the source block in markdown-mode.
Press C-c ' to return to the Org-mode buffer and insert the edit. This can look like what the following screenshot shows:
@N.N's answer is applicable to Chrome also, with these changes in details.
Chrome has Edit with Emacs extension, which is similar to It's all text. After installing it, you'll find further instructions from the extension options page.
There is an emacs customization group edit-server with options, most importantly the major mode change per site is configured differently than in @N.N's answer:
This is less an answer than a test of my solution using
the
Edit with Emacs chrome
plugin and the Emacs Edit Server
configured to use markdown-mode
for Stackoverflow (and other Stackexchange sites I use). All I had to do after
installing the extension and MELPA packages was set
Note in the above setting, I'm using org-mode for gmail messages. Still need
to do a little work here, but it is possible, with a little effort, to draft
your gmail message using org-mode and then use org-mime to generate html from
your org structured text. You could just use markdown and a markdown to html
conversion.
Pandoc has support for reading a subset of org-mode and can output markdown.
In other words, you can keep writing in org-mode, including writing italics /like this/, and then export to markdown.
From emacs you can convert to markdown by selecting the region, hitting C-u M-S-\ and typing pandoc -r org -t markdown, getting output like this:
In other words, you can keep writing in org-mode, including writing italics *like this*, and then export to markdown.
Or, you can save the file and convert it at the command line.