I've recently begun replacing Markdown with Gemini's .gmi/gemtext format. It is Markdown with fewer features. I appreciate the simplicity and it's tremendously easy for custom tools to parse.

It has no inline formatting, only 3 levels of ATX headers (without trailing #s), one level of bullet points using only asterisk and not dash to delimit, does not merge touching non-whitespace lines (thus expecting one line per paragraph), and supports only triple-backtick fenced preformatted text areas that just flip on and off.

Maybe the biggest change is that links are necessarily listed on their own line, proceeded by a `=>` and optionally followed by alt-text.

My gemtext parser is maybe 70 lines and it is arguably 95% of what one needs from Markdown.

I thought I was the only one. It is great for just having some text with headers and links, without any distractions.

Only complaint is that it handles line-breaks the way some Markdown variants do, with each line being one paragraph of text. I much prefer line-breaks to be just treated as whitespace and using double breaks to end paragraphs, like e.g. Pandoc's Markdown format (one reason I always use that when I render Markdown).