mdcat

Fancy cat for Markdown (that is, CommonMark):

$ mdcat sample.md

mdcat showcase with different colour themes

mdcat in [WezTerm], with "One Light (base16)", "Gruvbox Light", and "Darcula (base16)" (from left to right), and [JetBrains Mono] as font.

Features

mdcat works best with [iTerm2], [WezTerm], and [kitty], and a good terminal font with italic characters. Then it

| Terminal | Basic syntax | Syntax highlighting | Images | Jump marks | | :------------------------- | :-----------: | :-----------------: | :----: | :--------: | | Basic ANSI | ✓ | ✓ | | | | Windows [ConEmu] | ✓ | ✓ | | | | Windows 10 console | ✓ | ✓ | | | | Generic VTE 0.50 or newer¹ | ✓ | ✓ | | | | [Terminology] | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | | [iTerm2] | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 2) | ✓ | | [kitty] | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 2) | | | [WezTerm] | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ 2) | | | [foot] | ✓ | ✓ | | |

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 are rendered with [resvg], see [SVG support].

Not supported:

Usage

Try mdcat --help or read the mdcat(1) manpage.

Installation

Building

Run cargo build --release. The resulting mdcat executable links against the system's SSL library, i.e. openssl on Linux. To build a self-contained executable use cargo build --features=static; the resulting executable uses a pure Rust SSL implementation. It still uses the system's CA roots however.

The build process also generates the following additional files in $OUT_DIR:

These additional artifacts are included in the release builds. If you package mdcat you may want to include these files too.

Troubleshooting

mdcat can output extensive tracing information when asked to. Run mdcat with $MDCAT_LOG=trace for complete tracing information, or with $MDCAT_LOG=mdcat::render=trace to trace only rendering.

Future plans

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