mdcat
cat for Markdown (that is, CommonMark):
$ mdcat sample.md
mdcat in iTerm2, with Dracula, and Solarized Light and Dark (from left to right), and PragmataPro as font.
Features
mdcat works best with iTerm2 or a compatible terminal emulator, and a good
terminal font with italic characters. Then it
- nicely renders all basic CommonMark syntax (no tables or footnotes though),
- highlights code blocks with syntect,
- shows links and images inline in supported terminals (see above, where "Pixabay" is a clickable link!),
- adds jump marks for headings in iTerm2 (jump forwards and backwards with ⇧⌘↓ and ⇧⌘↑).
| Terminal | Basic syntax | Syntax highlighting | Links | Images | Jump marks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic ANSI | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Windows ConEmu | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Windows 10 console | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Generic VTE 0.50 or newer¹ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Terminology | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| iTerm2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| kitty | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
¹) VTE is Gnome’s terminal emulation library used by many popular terminal emulators on Linux, including Gnome Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Tilix, etc.
Not supported:
- CommonMark extensions: Footnotes and tables
- Re-filling paragraphs
Installation
Binaries
The Releases page provides pre-build binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows.
Use these binaries to try mdcat, particularly on Windows.
Note: The Linux build is statically linked and requires the curl command
to fetch images from HTTP(S).
3rd party packages
Some package managers include mdcat:
- Homebrew:
brew install mdcat - Arch Linux: mdcat in AUR
- Void Linux:
xbps-install -S mdcat
While these packages may not always be up to date we generally recommend to use
these to keep mdcat updated with the rest of the system.
Building with rustup
You can also build mdcat manually with cargo. Install Rust via rustup and
run cargo install mdcat. To keep mdcat up to date install cargo-update and
run cargo install-update mdcat.
SVG support
mdcat needs rsvg-convert to show SVG images in iTerm2 and kitty;
otherwise mdcat only shows the image title and URL for SVG images. On macOS
you can install the librsvg formula from Homebrew, on Linux the tool is
typically part of the librsvg-bin package (or similar).
Terminology renders SVG directly and needs no additional tools.
Future plans
- Figure out a better way to show HTML GH-3.
- CommonMark extensions: Footnotes GH-1.
- CommonMark extensions: Tables GH-2.
- Ignore soft wraps and wrap inline text a column limit instead GH-4.
License
Copyright Sebastian Wiesner sebastian@swsnr.de
Binaries are subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0, see LICENSE.
Most of the source is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0, see LICENSE, unless otherwise noted; some files are subject to the terms of the Apache 2.0 license, see http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0