mdview

A minimal terminal markdown reader written in Rust. Published on crates.io as mdview-tui; the installed binary is mdview.

mdview notes.md

What it does

Renders a single markdown file in a centered, fixed-width column inside the alternate screen. Toggle between the rendered view and the raw source with Tab. Scroll with the trackpad/mouse wheel, or with j/k and arrow keys.

Body paragraphs are justified to the column width. Standalone images render inline as half-block (▀) pixel previews at 80% of the column width — press o or click one (the bottom bar shows click: <file> while hovering) to open the original in your system viewer. LaTeX math renders as Unicode: $\gamma^d$ → γᵈ, $h_{\min}$ → hₘᵢₙ, \mathbb{E}[S] → 𝔼[S], with $$…$$ display equations centered on their own line. Complex TeX degrades to readable linear form (\frac{a}{b} → (a)/(b)) rather than raw source.

Install

cargo install mdview-tui

The crate is published as mdview-tui (the mdview name on crates.io was already taken), but the binary it installs is mdview — so you still run mdview notes.md after installing.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/Ivapo/mdview
cd mdview
cargo build --release
./target/release/mdview README.md

Keys

Tweaks

A few constants near the top of src/main.rs control the look:

const MAX_CONTENT_WIDTH:     u16 = 130;   // cap on column width
const MIN_CONTENT_WIDTH:     u16 = 80;    // floor for -/+ adjustments
const DEFAULT_CONTENT_WIDTH: u16 = 90;    // startup width target
const SIDE_MARGIN:           u16 = 4;     // breathing room left+right
const WIDTH_STEP:            u16 = 4;     // cells per -/+ press
const FRAME_COLOR:           Color = Color::DarkGray;
const TITLE_COLOR:           Color = Color::Green;

Startup column = min(DEFAULT_CONTENT_WIDTH, terminal_width - SIDE_MARGIN). Adjust live with - and + (clamped to [MIN_CONTENT_WIDTH, min(MAX_CONTENT_WIDTH, terminal_width - SIDE_MARGIN)]); each press re-renders the cached markdown.

Stack

• ratatui + crossterm — TUI rendering and input
• pulldown-cmark — CommonMark parser
• syntect — code-block syntax highlighting
• image — decoding for half-block image previews
• unicode-width — cell widths for table layout
• arboard — clipboard
• anyhow — error handling

The markdown renderer is a hand-rolled walk over the pulldown-cmark event stream — see src/render.rs. It handles headings (with ═/─ underbars on h1/h2), bold/italic/strikethrough/links, inline code, fenced code blocks (syntect-highlighted with a dark background and a language tag), ordered and unordered lists with nesting, blockquotes with a left bar, horizontal rules, tables with box-drawing borders that shrink columns to fit the content width, justified paragraphs, half-block image previews, and TeX math via a small hand-rolled converter (src/math.rs).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.