mdt

MarkDown in Terminal - Renders a markdown page in the terminal

Welcome to MarkDown in the Terminal!

Hi! I am your first Markdown file that you can open with mdt. If you want to learn about mdt, you can clone this repository and open me from the terminal with

mdt show README.md

If you want to play with Markdown, you can edit me. Once you have finished with me, you can run me in your terminal.

Installation

Clone the repository.

If you have administration permissions, run:

pip install mdt-viewer

Features

mdt has the following features:

• Interactive mode with dynamic adaptation to the terminal width.
• You can choose your favourite among some available themes.
• You can edit a them of add your own custom theme. Themes are defined with a simple JSON "CSS-like" format.
• Intelligent word wrapping.

In interactive mode you can:

• Open web links in the default browser (requires a graphic session to work).
• Follow links to local files forward and backward, allowing a convenient exploration of "wiki-style" files.

Project

mdt is built with Python, and uses the following libraries:

• Mistletoe to parse Markdown files.
• Python Prompt Toolkit for the interactive mode.
• Click to handle commmand line parameters.
• ansiwrap to perform the word wrapping.

Commands

The following commands are available:

$ mdt --help
Usage: mdt [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

Options:
  --version  Show the version and exit.
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  gallery  Shows a gallery with the available themes.
  show     Display the specified Markdown file.
  themes   Lists of available themes.

Command gallery

Shows a sample markdown file with the application of all the available themes for demonstration purposes.

Command show

Displays the specified markdown file with the default theme.

The theme can be selected by specifying the number among the ones available, or by using the --theme-file option to specify a custom theme.

$ mdt show --help
Usage: mdt show [OPTIONS] MDFILE

  Display the specified Markdown file.

Options:
  -i                 Interactive mode.
  --col INTEGER      Set the text width in number of columns.
  --rmargin INTEGER  Set the right margin.
  --theme INTEGER    Use a default theme by ID.
  --theme-file TEXT  Use the specified theme file.
  --help             Show this message and exit.

Interactive mode

With the -i option, mdt is started in "interactive mode". It then uses an internal pager which allows the scrolling of the text, and an intelligent word-wrapping.

Moreover, by pressing the Tab key, the pager moves to the next link in the markdown file. Pressing ENTER on a link opens that link. A link to a web page opens the browser. A link to a file on the filesystem opens that file in mdt. The history of opened files can be navigated using left and right arrows.

Command themes

mdt comes with some sample themes. This command lists the available themes.

More themes will be added. Pull requests are welcome to provide new themes.

Themimg

The themes are specified in a file with JSON format. Examples are available in the mdt/themes directory.

The format is inspired by the one in the Glamour Go library, with some additional fields to provide more options.

An example of theme file is:

{
  "document": {
    "prefix": "",
    "suffix": "",
    "margin": 2
  },
  "block_quote": {
    "prefix": "",
    "suffix": "",
    "color": "",
    "background_color": "",
    "bold": false,
    "underline": false,
    "blink": false
  },
  ...

where the styling items should be pretty self-explanatory.

The available items that can be themed are: document block_quote, paragraph, heading, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, strikethrough, emph, strong, item, list, link, selected_link, inline_code, block_code.

Contributors

• Tullio Facchinetti
• Guido Benetti
• Andrea Catena