mdcat

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