Reading Markdown files on the FreeBSD CLI with Glow
Context
I use Markdown more and more; combined with Nextcloud for files synchronisation, it is a perfect match for me, allowing to take notes on the go, organise files, projects, etc.
Quite often I would SSH into my home laptop to quickly edit a Markdown file, but sometimes I want to make sure the rendering is OK, especially when dealing with tables, which are easy to break.
I needed a Markdown viewer/renderer for the CLI, and something light.
Finding glow
The first results I found where either online viewers, or Markdown viewers that were included in much bigger projects, which was too much for me.
Then I found Glow which looked really
great.
Cherry on the cake: it is part of FreeBSD's packages!
# pkg search glow
afterglow-1.6.2_2 Collection of graph-generating scripts
glow-1.5.1_7 Render markdown on the CLI, with pizzazz!
Here is how a Markdown file with a table looks like normally:
And with glow rendering it:
(Note that I used -w to display a wider table):
glow --help:
-w, --width uint word-wrap at width
Tags: IT