🎩 charMD

A simple, extendable markdown renderer for your terminal.

🚧 This module is in early developement, expect breaking changes 🚧

charMD enables you to render a markdown text into a string, which printed in the terminal provides a well formatted output, instead of plain text.

Try it out

To see the general capabilities of this module run:

deno run https://deno.land/x/charmd/example.ts

To see, how a specific markdown gets rendered run:

deno run --allow-read https://deno.land/x/charmd/example.ts ./README.md

Usage

Simply import the module and call the renderMarkdown method with your markdown text.

import { renderMarkdown } from 'https://deno.land/x/charmd/mod.ts';

console.log(renderMarkdown('# Hello world 🌍!'));

🧩 Extensions

The module provides a way to extend it functionality with additional extensions, which can be provided in it’s options param.

An extension can implement any of the Extension interface’s methods, which are:

• init: Called before AST generation, if a string is returned, it will override the input markdown for later extension’s init fn and processing steps.
• postAST: Called with the generated AST’s root node, before any transformations
• transformNode: Called with each node to do modifications on the node and it’s children in the AST.
• postTransform: Called with root, after all the transformations ran for all nodes.
• generateNode: Called with each node. It should return the string representation of the rendered node,if the extension handles that specific node, or void, if its not handled by the extension.
• postGenerate: Called after the string representation is created.

A simple extension, that renders link with green and blue instead of the built-in cyan would look something like this:

const LinkExt = {
    generateNode(genFn, node: Node, parent: Node, options: Options) {
          if(node.type === 'link') {
            const linkText = node.children?.map(ch => genFn(ch, node, options)).join('') || '';
            const link = `Link with text '${colors.blue(linkText)}' points to ${colors.cyan(node.url!)}`
            return colors.green(link);
          }
      }
}

console.log(renderMarkdown(
    '[charMD](https://github.com/littletof/charmd)',
    { extensions: [LinkExt] }
));

Direct use - cli.ts

For direct use in the terminal run cli.ts:

deno run --allow-net https://deno.land/x/charmd/cli.ts -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denoland/deno/master/README.md

Or install it with deno install

It has three options:

• -s for rendering a string directly: -s "# markdown string"
• -l for rendering a local file: -l ./README.md
• -r for rendering a remote file: -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denoland/deno/master/README.md

Permissions

The module itself requires no permissions to run.

If --unstable is provided, horizontal separators will consider the terminal’s width.

Limitations

• No syntax highlight
• No multiline tables cells
• Possible hiccups with more complex markdowns (Please open an issue about it)

These could change in the future, but the aim is to keep the module’s complexity minimal.

Also, many of these should also be solvable using extensions.

syntax highlight example

Notes

• The main functions are also exported from the module, so for example you can use the toAST function to get your ast for the markdown and process it yourself.

• As its core, it currently uses mdast-util-from-markdown, to get the AST, you can also provide extensions to it in the options unstable mdast property.

• This module’s core structure draws from @dephraims work with https://github.com/dephraiim/termd.

Contributions

Feedback and contributions are always welcome. Open an issue or a PR, or contact me on the Deno discord.

TODO

• fix lists
• remove dots from codeblock backgrounds
• links with images
• # Header with *italic*
• strikethrough, underline
• basic tests
• lint
• fmt
• Look into alternatives for the AST generation.