Glow

A terminal-based Markdown reader and browser, powered by glamour and bubbletea.

TL;DR

The Problem: Reading Markdown in the terminal is painful without styling and navigation.

The Solution: Glow renders Markdown with themes, wrapping, and a pager UI.

Why Glow

Beautiful rendering via glamour.
Interactive: scroll, search, and browse files.
Scriptable: read from stdin or local files.

Role in the charmed_rust (FrankenTUI) stack

Glow is the flagship CLI app that demonstrates how bubbletea, bubbles, and glamour work together. It’s also a real end-user tool you can install.

Crates.io package

Package name: charmed-glow
Library crate name: glow
Binary name: glow

Installation

[dependencies]
glow = { package = "charmed-glow", version = "0.1.2" }

Install the CLI:

cargo install charmed-glow

CLI Usage

# Render a file
glow README.md

# From stdin
cat README.md | glow -

# Theme override
glow --style dracula README.md

# Set wrap width
glow --width 80 README.md

Configuration

Create ~/.config/glow/config.yml:

style: dark
width: 100
pager: true
mouse: true
local_only: false

Library Usage

use glow::{Config, Reader};

let config = Config::new().style("dark").width(80).pager(true);
let reader = Reader::new(config);
let output = reader.read_file("README.md")?;
println!("{output}");

Feature Flags

github: enable GitHub README fetching.
syntax-highlighting: enabled by default via glamour.

glow = { package = "charmed-glow", version = "0.1.2", features = ["github"] }

Key Bindings

j / Down: scroll down
k / Up: scroll up
q: quit

Troubleshooting

No colors: set COLORTERM=truecolor or use --style ascii.
Pager won’t scroll: ensure you’re in a tty and not piping output.

Limitations

GitHub fetching requires the github feature.
Rendering is terminal-only (no HTML export).

FAQ

Can I embed Glow in my own app?
Yes. Use the Reader API from the library.

Does it support custom themes?
Yes, via glamour style configuration.

About Contributions

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I do not accept outside contributions for any of my projects. I simply don't have the mental bandwidth to review anything, and it's my name on the thing, so I'm responsible for any problems it causes; thus, the risk-reward is highly asymmetric from my perspective. I'd also have to worry about other "stakeholders," which seems unwise for tools I mostly make for myself for free. Feel free to submit issues, and even PRs if you want to illustrate a proposed fix, but know I won't merge them directly. Instead, I'll have Claude or Codex review submissions via gh and independently decide whether and how to address them. Bug reports in particular are welcome. Sorry if this offends, but I want to avoid wasted time and hurt feelings. I understand this isn't in sync with the prevailing open-source ethos that seeks community contributions, but it's the only way I can move at this velocity and keep my sanity.

License

MIT. See LICENSE at the repository root.

charmed-glow 0.2.0