How to Add Line Breaks in Markdown

Markdown has three ways to produce a hard line break, and all render the same <br> element. The classic form is two trailing spaces at the end of a line — invisible in the source, which is both its charm and its curse. The explicit form is a literal <br> tag, which works anywhere raw HTML is allowed. The third, added by CommonMark, is a backslash at the very end of the line — visible, unambiguous, and the least known of the three. Keep all of them distinct from a paragraph break: a blank line between blocks creates separate <p> elements with vertical spacing, while a line break keeps consecutive lines inside one paragraph — the right tool for addresses, poetry, and song lyrics.

The two-trailing-spaces form has a famous failure mode: editors delete it. VS Code's "trim trailing whitespace" setting, EditorConfig's trim_trailing_whitespace rule, linters, and pre-commit hooks all strip whitespace from line ends on save or commit — and your line breaks silently vanish with it. Because the marker is invisible, the breakage is hard to diagnose: the source looks identical before and after. This is why many style guides ban trailing-space breaks in committed files and standardize on <br> or the trailing backslash, both of which survive automated formatting.

What a single newline does depends heavily on context, even within one platform. In rendered .md files — READMEs, docs sites, anything processed as a document — a lone newline is a soft break: the lines join into one paragraph with a space between them. But GitHub treats comments, issue bodies, and pull request descriptions like chat, rendering every single newline as a hard break. The same text pasted into a README and an issue renders differently, which confuses people in both directions. Obsidian sits in the middle with a "strict line breaks" setting that toggles between the two behaviors. When line layout matters, test in the destination context rather than assuming.

A final note on what line breaks cannot do: create empty vertical space. Stacking three blank lines between paragraphs collapses into a single paragraph break — Markdown normalizes consecutive blank lines. If you genuinely need extra spacing, repeated <br> tags work where HTML is allowed, but the need is often a signal to restructure: a horizontal rule for a thematic break, a heading for a new section, or a list instead of break-separated lines. The one place where <br> is irreplaceable is inside table cells, where neither trailing spaces nor blank lines can work because a cell must stay on one source line.