JIRA uses its own plain-text markup syntax, which I don't like as much as Markdown.
Fokke Zandbergen has a great online service for converting between JIRA markup and Markdown, but it's too cumbersome to use this when you are living in JIRA comments.
I re-appropriated Fokke's JavaScript into a Keyboard Maestro macro:
This will take the Markdown in the clipboard and paste it as JIRA markup whenever you type ";jira".
You can download the macro here.
Update – May 26, 2016: I have added support for multi-level unordered lists – the updated code is below.
🌟 Was this page helpful? Please let me know with this quick, 3 question survey.