Mdview and the missing middle between less and Electron
Mdview is a fast Markdown viewer designed for the Wayland desktop, aiming to provide a quick way to read Markdown files without disrupting workflow. It sits between lightweight tools like less and heavier Electron-based viewers, offering structured text rendering without the overhead of a full application. The project utilizes direct communication with Wayland and a simple architecture to efficiently render Markdown content.
- ▪Mdview is intended for quick viewing of Markdown files in a terminal environment.
- ▪It uses a direct approach to interact with Wayland, avoiding larger GUI toolkits.
- ▪The application is lightweight, with a stripped binary size of 2.6 MB.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I wrote mdview because I wanted a fast Markdown viewer for the Wayland desktop. Just a quick way to open a README or a design note without breaking flow. Developers spend a lot of time around Markdown files: READMEs, runbooks, changelogs, design notes, random NOTES.md files in project directories. Most of the time I am already in a terminal when I want to read one. The usual options all work, but none of them feel quite right. less and vim are fast, but they show raw text. That works, but I usually need longer to understand what I am looking at. Markdown is often written to be read as structured text. Headings, tables, links, anchors, images, and highlighted code blocks make it easier to work with.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Leon Becker's Blog.
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