This is a markdown file that will be displayed on the main page of the repository by GitHub, as well as other cloud version control services. In other words, README.md is the summary of a given repository, and is used to introduce other developers to that repository using the markdown markup language.
To be able to take full advantage of PyCharm's support for markdown files, you will need to download its Markdown plugin (if you haven't already). Let's see how we can do that:
- Open PyCharm's settings, go to Plugins, and click on the Marketplace tab. From here, you can look for and install the plugin by typing markdown in the search bar at the top of the window, as follows:
- Now, go ahead and open the README.md file in the editor. You can see that when a markdown file is edited within PyCharm's editor, the changes that are being made to the file are displayed in real time. For example, as markdown code is entered in the left-hand section of the editor (which contains the actual source code of a given markdown file), the right-hand section will display the corresponding output, as illustrated here:
This is quite a powerful feature that PyCharm offers, allowing for real-time markdown editing and adjusting. To find out more about the syntax of the markdown language, you can reference the cheat sheet at https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet.