Markdown Viewer

Question

I found a file formatted with Markdown. Could you guys suggest what viewer that I could use to view this type of files? Hopefully one without gui (if it's possible)

Update I was actually looking for a viewer that could parse markdown file format that does not need any conversion. But something close to that should be ok.

Answer 1

The following website provides a tool that will translate markdown into HTML:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Once you convert the file to HTML, there are a number of command line tools to use to view the file. Using a test file that contains markdown formatted-text, I found the following worked nicely.

$ wget http://daringfireball.net/projects/downloads/Markdown_1.0.1.zip
$ unzip Markdown_1.0.1.zip
$ cd Markdown_1.0.1/
$ ./Markdown.pl ~/testfile.markdown | html2text

html2text is one of many tools you can use to view html formatted text from the command line. Another option, if you want slightly nicer output would be to use lynx:

$ ./Markdown.pl ~/testfile.markdown | lynx -stdin

If you are an emacs user, someone has written a mode for markdown which is available here: http://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/. This provides nice syntax highlighting as can be seen in the screenshot on that website.

All of these tools should be available for slackware.

Answer 2

There's also Discount, David Parsons' C implementation of John Gruber's Markdown text to html language. Discount consists of several command-line tools including markdown, mkd2html, makepage, mktags and theme.

http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/

In addition, there's an implementation of markdown in C, using a PEG grammar.

https://github.com/jgm/peg-markdown

On Mac OS X you also may have a look at qlmarkdown, a QuickLook generator for Markdown files.

Answer 3

2 more tools:
- Showdown is JavaScript port or Markdown: http://attacklab.net/showdown/ . You can use it only from browser
- txt2tags can read Markdown format but it adds a lot of new options and featues: http://txt2tags.org/online.php

Answer 4

I know you said you preferred a non-GUI application, but I am currently working on a GUI application called DownMarker which does this. You can find the source in a mercurial repository here. You can find a stand-alone executable to run with mono or .NET here.

Caveat: It is far from finished and only occasionally tested on linux/mono. Last test I did was on Mono 2.6. If you want to build it yourself will need a recent version of mercurial to clone the repository, and MonoDevelop to compile the application.

Answer 5

Here is a commandline script which opens up a markdown file in your browser after converting it into html: http://minhajuddin.com/2012/03/16/markdown-viewer-script-for-your-markdown-documents/

Answer 6

Assuming you want to see what the html looks like: Use a web browser (with an addon) as a viewer.

For example, for Google Chrome there's TextDown which also lets you edit files straight in the browser and see a live preview.

After adding it, you also need to go to chrome://chrome/extensions/ and check "allow access to file URLs" so you can open local files. A warning though: if you save (shift-ctrl-s) TextDown does not save to the file you opened but to your downloads folder.