Expand description
Render and style markdown in a terminal.
How hard can it be?
Well, as it turns out, rendering from markdown AST (which you get from the myriad of parsing libraries) is not trivial - at all! A terminal is nothing like HTML - we don’t need to use special elements like lists, tables, blocks… we just need to display the text exactly as it is layed out, but with some styles (colors, bold, italics, underline…). When rendering from AST, the original layout has been lost. It’s extremely tedious to implement all edge cases, and because the specs are not very strict, it’s not really possible to re-create the original.
Luckily, somebody has already solved it: termimad produces “terminal-styled” output for markdown.
rat_skin leverages termimad for ratatui.
Line wrapping is taken care of, and the styles can be customized with a “skin” (hence the name).
let rat_skin = RatSkin::default();
let lines: Vec<Line> = rat_skin.parse(RatSkin::parse_text("**cook it!**"), 80);
assert_eq!(lines, vec![Line::from(Span::from("cook it!").bold())]);You can set a termimad::MadSkin (re-exported from termimad) on RatSkin to customize appearances. The output is a list of ratatui::text::Lines, wrapped to the given width.
This is all you need to know about ratskin - for everything else, please see termimad:
- https://github.com/Canop/termimad/
- https://crates.io/crates/termimad/
- https://docs.rs/termimad/latest/termimad/
Because termimad is very streamlined for writing terminal output directly (for good reasons), a small part of the logic had to be rewritten for ratatui Spans and Lines.
Structs§
- MadSkin
- A skin defining how a parsed markdown appears on the terminal (fg and bg colors, bold, italic, underline, etc.)
- RatSkin
- Wrapper around termimad::MadSkin.
Enums§
- Attribute
- Represents an attribute.