Two different syntaxes get called "Jira markup", and mixing them up is the most common reason formatting silently fails. Cloud is on the left of your mind, Data Center on the right.
| Want | Type |
|---|---|
| Heading 1–6 | # … ###### then space |
| Bold | **text** |
| Italic | *text* or _text_ |
| Strikethrough | ~~text~~ |
| Inline code | single backticks around the text |
| Code block | three backticks at line start |
| Bulleted list | - or * then space |
| Numbered list | 1. then space |
| Task list | [] then space |
| Block quote | > then space |
| Divider | --- at line start |
| Mention | @ then the name |
These fire on typing. None of them fire on paste: see pasting Markdown into Jira. Tables are the notable absence: pipe tables do not autoformat, see Markdown tables in Jira.
| Want | Type |
|---|---|
| Heading | h1. … h6. then space |
| Bold | *text*: single asterisks |
| Italic | _text_ |
| Strikethrough | -text- |
| Inline code | {{text}} |
| Code block | {code:java} … {code} |
| Preformatted | {noformat} … {noformat} |
| Bulleted list | * at line start |
| Numbered list | # at line start |
| Quote | bq. or {quote} … {quote} |
| Table | ||head||head|| then |cell|cell| |
| Link | [text|https://example.com] |
| Panel | {panel:title=T} … {panel} |
*text* is italic in Markdown and
bold in wiki markup.# is a heading in Markdown and a
numbered list item in wiki markup.These notes are written by sellerkit. We build a Markdown editor app for Jira (below), which is why we had to work all of this out in the first place.
Everything above this box works whether or not you install anything. Where a workaround is enough, we say so.