md2browser

Simple shell function for rendering Markdown files to HTML and opening them in your default web browser. Motivated by a dissatisfaction with the lack of lightweight open-source Markdown viewers (not editors) for Linux. Inspired by this Reddit comment.

Setup

Run these three commands...

curl --create-dirs -o ~/.pandoc/md2browser.css https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abyrne55/md2browser/refs/heads/main/md2browser.css
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abyrne55/md2browser/refs/heads/main/md2browser.sh >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

...or manually follow these instructions:

1. Make sure you have pandoc (for rendering Markdown to HTML) and rumdl (for cleaning up the input Markdown file such that Pandoc renders it properly) installed and in your $PATH
2. Download the CSS template (md2browser.css to somewhere where Pandoc can find it, e.g., ~/.pandoc/md2browser.css
3. Copy the md() shell function (md2browser.sh) and paste it into your ~/.bashrc (or wherever your shell's config lives)
4. Make customizations if necessary, for example...
   • md(): change xdg-open to open if you're using macOS
   • md(): remove the rumdl line if don't think a linting step is necessary
   • md2browser.css: change the font, background color, etc.
5. Restart your terminal (or run source ~/.bashrc)

Usage

md document.md
# and then your default browser opens a rendered version of document.md :)

How It Works

1. cats your Markdown file into a linter (rumdl) to fix anything that might trip up the renderer without actually modifying the file
2. Pipes the linter's output into Pandoc, which uses the provided CSS* to render the linted Markdown input to a self-contained HTML file
3. Saves that HTML to a temporary file created using mktemp and named based on the original Markdown file's absolute path
4. Opens that temporary HTML file in your default web browser

*the provided CSS is just the default CSS that Pandoc uses, plus some quality-of-life tweaks like an automatic dark mode, a sans-serif font, and a wider body column.