mdcat
Fancy 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 Kitty, 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 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 2) | ✓ |
kitty | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 2) |
- VTE is Gnome’s terminal emulation library used by many popular terminal emulators on Linux, including Gnome Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Tilix, etc.
- SVG images require
rsvg-convert
from librsvg.
Not supported:
- CommonMark extensions: Footnotes and tables
- Re-filling paragraphs
Usage
Try mdcat --help
or read the mdcat(1) manpage.
Installation
- The Releases page provides pre-build binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows.
- Note: The Linux build is statically linked and requires the
curl
command to fetch images from HTTP(S). - Tip: You can copy or hard-link
mdcat
tomdless
for a variant ofmdcat
which paginates by default (likemdcat -p
).
- Note: The Linux build is statically linked and requires the
- 3rd party packages:
- Homebrew:
brew install mdcat
- Arch Linux:
pacman -S mdcat
- Void Linux:
xbps-install -S mdcat
- Nixpkgs:
nix-env -i mdcat
- Homebrew:
- You can also build
mdcat
manually withcargo install mdcat
.
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