opexxx / mdcat

cat for markdown

mdcat

Fancy cat for Markdown (that is, CommonMark):

$ mdcat sample.md

mdcat in kitty, with Tango Light, Dracula, and Solarized Light (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)

1. VTE is Gnome’s terminal emulation library used by many popular terminal emulators on Linux, including Gnome Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Tilix, etc.
2. 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.
  • Tip: You can copy or hard-link mdcat to mdless for a variant of mdcat which paginates by default (like mdcat -p).
• 3rd party packages:
  • Homebrew: brew install mdcat
  • Arch Linux: pacman -S mdcat
  • Void Linux: xbps-install -S mdcat
  • Nixpkgs: nix-env -i mdcat
  • Scoop: scoop install mdcat
• You can also build mdcat manually with cargo 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 [e-mail]

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