mdcat

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 a compatible terminal emulator, 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 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | kitty | ✓ | ✓ | | ✓ | |

¹) VTE is Gnome’s terminal emulation library used by many popular terminal emulators on Linux, including Gnome Terminal, Xfce Terminal, Tilix, etc.

Not supported:

• CommonMark extensions: Footnotes and tables
• Re-filling paragraphs

Installation

Binaries

The [Releases] page provides pre-build binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows. Use these binaries to try mdcat, particularly on Windows.

Note: The Linux build is statically linked and requires the curl command to fetch images from HTTP(S).

3rd party packages

Some package managers include mdcat:

• [Homebrew]: brew install mdcat
• Arch Linux: mdcat in AUR
• Void Linux: xbps-install -S mdcat

While these packages may not always be up to date we generally recommend to use these to keep mdcat updated with the rest of the system.

Building with rustup

You can also build mdcat manually with cargo. Install Rust via [rustup] and run cargo install mdcat. To keep mdcat up to date install [cargo-update] and run cargo install-update mdcat.

SVG support

mdcat needs rsvg-convert to show SVG images in [iTerm2] and [kitty]; otherwise mdcat only shows the image title and URL for SVG images. On macOS you can install the librsvg formula from Homebrew, on Linux the tool is typically part of the librsvg-bin package (or similar).

[Terminology] renders SVG directly and needs no additional tools.

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 2018-2020 Sebastian Wiesner sebastian@swsnr.de

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.