Markdown Paste

Most 'Markdown' tools render your document to HTML and show you the pretty version. That's the wrong tool when the thing you need to share is the source itself — the literal # headings, the [text](url) link syntax, the fenced code blocks with their language hints, the raw table pipes. files.link deliberately does not render: it shares the exact Markdown source with syntax highlighting, so the recipient sees and copies the characters you wrote, not a one-way HTML projection of them.

This is the use case rendering tools can't serve. You're sending a draft blog post to an editor who needs to edit the Markdown, not admire the HTML. You're sharing a README's source so a maintainer can paste it into their repo. You're showing a colleague how you wrote a tricky nested list or a footnote so they can replicate the syntax. You're handing someone a docs page's source to translate.

In every case the value is the unrendered text, and a renderer would actively destroy it by collapsing the syntax into presentation.

It also sidesteps the dialect problem. GitHub Flavored Markdown, CommonMark, and whatever your static-site generator uses all render differently — task lists, tables, autolinks, and admonitions are not portable. By sharing raw source, you let the recipient run it through their own renderer and get the result their toolchain produces, instead of locking them into how some web previewer happened to interpret it.

Mermaid blocks, math, and custom directives stay as literal fenced source for the reader's renderer to handle.

No signup is needed to create or read. Anonymous pastes hold 100KB and clear after 24 hours; signing in raises the limit to 1MB and lets you pick an expiry up to permanent, which is what you want for a documentation snippet or a style-guide example that should resolve indefinitely. Paste source, choose Markdown for highlighting, send the link — the reader gets editable, copyable text, not a screenshot of formatting.