Flavors

Overview

You can use flavors (or presets) to set the preferred options automatically. In this way, Showdown behaves like popular Markdown flavors.

Currently, the following flavors are available:

• original: Original Markdown flavor as in John Gruber's spec
• vanilla: Showdown base flavor (v1.3.1 onwards)
• gfm: GitHub Flavored Markdown, or GFM. Also available under its former name github, kept as a backwards-compatible alias (both resolve to the exact same options).
• commonmark: CommonMark (v3.0.0 onwards). Enables the cmSpec option — see Spec compliance.

Options activated by each flavor

A flavor is simply a bundle of option overrides applied on top of Showdown's defaults. The table below lists every option that at least one flavor sets:

• vanilla applies no overrides of its own — its column shows the plain Showdown defaults.

Legend: ✅ = on · ❌ = off · (blank) = off (default).

Option	vanilla	original	gfm	commonmark
noHeaderId		✅		✅
requireSpaceBeforeHeadingText			✅	✅
ghCodeBlocks	✅	❌	✅	✅
strikethrough	✅	❌	✅	❌
omitExtraWLInCodeBlocks			✅
simplifiedAutoLink			✅
literalMidWordUnderscores			✅
tables			✅
tablesHeaderId			✅
tasklists			✅
disableForced4SpacesIndentedSublists			✅
ghMentions			✅
backslashEscapesHTMLTags			✅
emoji			✅
splitAdjacentBlockquotes			✅
decodeEntities				✅
cmSpec				✅

Note

ghCodeBlocks defaults to on, so vanilla, gfm and commonmark all keep GFM fenced code blocks enabled; only original turns them off. strikethrough likewise defaults to on (enabled in vanilla and gfm); the spec-oriented original and commonmark flavors turn it off.

Set flavor

GloballyLocally

showdown.setFlavor('gfm');

converter.setFlavor('gfm');

github alias

github is kept as a backwards-compatible alias for gfm, so setFlavor('github') and getFlavorOptions('github') keep working and return the same options. getFlavors() lists both names. New code should prefer gfm.