Show HN: Lint Your Markdown with ESLint

A new Show HN post is pitching a simple idea: use ESLint, a popular code checker, to clean up Markdown, the plain-text format people use for notes, readme files, and docs. On paper, it’s tidy, practical, and almost aggressively wholesome. The creator even opens with the classic open-source love language: please star the project on GitHub. But the real action, as always, is in the crowd reaction, where people instantly turned a humble documentation tool into a mini culture war about how much policing is too much policing.

The strongest opinion? A split between “finally, my messy docs can stop embarrassing me” and “we are absolutely over-linting society”. Supporters loved the idea of catching broken formatting and keeping team docs neat, especially since the plugin is meant to work alongside ESLint’s built-in Markdown support rather than replace it. Critics, meanwhile, rolled their eyes at yet another tool for telling grown adults where to put spaces and punctuation, joking that soon we’ll need a linter for grocery lists and breakup texts. That spawned the best humor: comments riffing on “my README has a stricter upbringing than I did” energy, plus the usual programmer self-dragging about spending more time formatting notes than writing them. In other words: a small utility dropped, and the community immediately made it about control, chaos, and whether neatness is a virtue or a personality disorder.