mdcat

Fancy cat for Markdown (that is, CommonMark):

$ mdcat sample.md

mdcat in WezTerm, with "One Light (base16)", "Gruvbox Light", and "Darcula (base16)" (from left to right), and JetBrains Mono as font.

Features

mdcat works best with iTerm2, WezTerm, and 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 also images inline in supported terminals (see above, where "Rust" is a clickable link!),
• adds jump marks for headings in iTerm2 (jump forwards and backwards with ⇧⌘↓ and ⇧⌘↑).

1. mdcat requires that the terminal supports strikethrough formatting and inline links. It will not render strikethrough text and links correctly on terminals that don't support these (e.g. the Linux text console)
2. VTE is Gnome’s terminal emulation library used by many popular terminal emulators on Linux, including Gnome Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Tilix, etc.
3. SVG images are rendered with resvg, see SVG support.

Not supported:

• CommonMark extensions: Footnotes and tables

Usage

Try mdcat --help or read the mdcat(1) manpage.

Installation

• Release binaries built on Github Actions.
• 3rd party packages at Repology
• You can also build mdcat manually with cargo install mdcat (see below for details).

Building

Run cargo build --release. The resulting mdcat executable links against the system's SSL library, i.e. openssl on Linux. To build a self-contained executable use cargo build --features=static; the resulting executable uses a pure Rust SSL implementation. It still uses the system's CA roots however.

The build process also generates the following additional files in $OUT_DIR:

• Completions for Bash, Zsh, Fish, and Powershell, for both mdcat and mdless, in completions sub-directory.
• A mdcat.1 manpage, build from mdcat.1.adoc with the asciidoctor command from AsciiDoctor. If asciidoctor is not found the build script prints a warning.

These additional artifacts are included in the release builds. If you package mdcat you may want to include these files too.

Troubleshooting

mdcat can output extensive tracing information when asked to. Run mdcat with $MDCAT_LOG=trace for complete tracing information, or with $MDCAT_LOG=mdcat::render=trace to trace only rendering.

Future plans

• Figure out a better way to show HTML #3.
• CommonMark extensions: Footnotes #1.
• CommonMark extensions: Tables #2.

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