Termimad: use Markdown to display rich text in a terminal application

The goal of Termimad isn't to deal with existing markdown documents, but to provide an easy way to display a scrollable help screen, or small rich text snippets, in your terminal based application (using crossterm).

  • easily type and build simple texts with small formatting
  • separate colors from content in your code (shines when application colors are user configurable)
  • wrap and justify text and tables, according to your terminal width

Here's an example (from broot):

20190618-broot-help-2

I have no idea whether many devs will find this as convenient as I do.
Or how many of you will just find this ridiculously niche.
Or already have a better solution.
But I'll be interested in your opinion.

21 Likes

I love it!

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Sounds like a nice alternative to man pages / texinfo.

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Thanks. There are probably many features I didn't find useful enough to implement but that would be needed by other programmers. Don't hesitate to ask.

Have you considered to make the feature of showing slides as well? Like mdp or patat.

No I didn't, that wasn't my use case. But I might be misunderstanding you: you're linking us to two fine looking tools, why would the world need a third one ? To embed slides as part of a bigger terminal application ?

Have you considered syntax highlighting for code blocks?

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Not until now. This is an interesting idea. I could look into it (with probably optional dependencies) if there's some interest.

3 Likes

I have no idea whether many devs will find this as convenient as I do.

Good job!

We were just talking on cargo-release about wanting to ship some of the markdown help, so I'd find this very useful.

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Cool. Don't hesitate to call for help for your integration.

(and thanks for cargo-release, btw. I'll probably use it to ease my releases)

I would second this.
I think that having syntax highlighting would be quite useful.

syntect or something like it perhaps? (I have not used it yet just doing some looking for another project I am working on.)

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