Create a Markdown-Powered Textarea with Stimulus | Rails Designer

Today I want to explore how to recreate (most of) GitHub’s markdown-powered textarea. It is a feature I want to add to Rails Designers (private community for Rails UI engineers) and thought it would be nice to share my first version with you. I like this approach as the HTML’s textarea is available in all browsers and can be used to write any comment, prose or whatever else needed with markdown. JavaScript is not needed, but if present it enhances the experience a fair bit. What I intend to add today: basic formatting options (bold, italic, etc.); paste urls to markdown; fetch page title from URL; drag & drop images to upload with ActiveStorage.