The glow utility is CLI markdown
renderer written in Go. It is part of the CCU
(charmbraclet CLI universe). And yes, I just
made up CCU.
glow is great because it processes and outputs a markdown file with some
styling tailored to a terminal including:
- colors to emphasize things like headings
- styling of inline code snippets
- syntax highlighting for fenced code blocks
- rendering of markdown tables
- and a lot more that I'm not thinking to mention
In the past I've installed this with brew, but I currently manage my glow
install with this mise config.
To view a nicely rendered markdown file, I can run:
$ glow README.mdFor long markdown files like this README.md, this
doesn't work too well because it renders until the end and spits you at at the
bottom.
Fortunately, glow has a built-in pager that maintains all the styling while
allowing you to navigate and search similar to less.
$ glow -p README.mdThere is also a TUI version (-t), but I find that less intuitive and useful
than the pager.
See glow --help for more details.