In the real-time strategy game Warcraft III, players construct bases and command units within the made-up realm of Azeroth. An MDX file is a model file used by the game. It contains meshes and textures for units and buildings, as well as a 3D game model. MDX files are used to store pre-made 3D models or to use editors to customize 3D models.
A dictionary file used by MDict, a multilingual dictionary app for Windows and mobile devices, can also be an MDX file. It has a list of definitions for various words.
A Markdown (.MD) file with components of JavaScript XML (.JSX) syntax can also be called an MDX file. It includes source code that is utilized in a React application or webpage. With the help of the MDX library, developers can add React components and JavaScript XML syntax to their Markdown files.
You can open MDX files in any text editor because they are just plain text files. On the other hand, you should open an MDX file in a source code editor if you intend to edit it.
However, what is the purpose of your MDX usage?
You can write JSX directly in your markdown files with MDX, a superset of markdown. It’s an effective way to incorporate React components into your content and add dynamic interactivity.
Both local MDX content within your application and remote MDX files that are dynamically fetched from the server can be supported by Next.js. The Next.js plugin manages the conversion of React and markdown components to HTML, with support for usage in Server Components—the App Router default.
The Next.js framework is configured to handle markdown and MDX using the @next/mdx package. It uses local files as a source of data, so you can make pages in your /pages or /app directory that end in.mdx. You can dynamically retrieve your markdown or MDX files or content from another location on the server. Content kept in a different local folder, CMS, database, or anyplace else can benefit from this.
Frontmatter is a key/value pair that is similar to YAML and can be used to store page-specific information. Frontmatter is not supported by @next/mdx by default; however, there are numerous ways to include frontmatter in your MDX content.
Now let’s investigate the MDX file structure.
"An authorable format that lets you seamlessly write JSX in your Markdown documents" is how the official MDX website defines MDX. You can write standard Markdown if you’d rather not use MDX. The React component receives JSX attributes as props. A child in an MDX file is a block of Markdown text that is sandwiched between JSX tags; it is also passed to the React component in a prop named children. Frontmatter includes information about the post, including the description and title. The MDX file’s frontmatter is positioned between three sets of hyphens (—) at the top. Markdown and JSX are combined to create MDX, and most formatting can be done using standard Markdown syntax.
Now let’s examine the MDX code style.
The MDX format allows components to be embedded into markdown documents by combining JSX code with markup from markdown documents. It is utilized in blog posts, documentation, and a lot more because JSX allows for the addition of interactive examples.
We’re going to examine a library today called Code Hike, which offers outstanding functionality for markdown code blocks. Code focussing, adding filenames and displaying them as tabs, annotations, text-to-code linking, and a lot more are among them!
Let’s examine how to incorporate Code Hike into a Next.js program. Be aware that while many frameworks, including Vue, Svelte, and others, support MDX, Code Hike is limited to React. A lot of the features in Code Hike are still experimental and it is still in beta.