Fast, themeable Markdown viewer for the terminal

Tip

Русская версия: README-RU.md

Note

mdv is a terminal Markdown viewer focused on precise rendering inside ANSI-capable terminals. It offers:

• Terminal-first rendering - Syntax highlighted output, optional HTML export, and careful handling of inline formatting.
• Reusable layouts - Control width, wrapping strategy, heading indentation, and table behavior to match your workspace.
• Link presentation control - Switch between clickable, inline, or tabular links and choose how URLs wrap, shorten, or overflow.
• Rich theming - Built-in color schemes plus on-the-fly overrides for UI and syntax palettes.
• Live monitoring - Watch files with --monitor to refresh the view whenever the source changes.
• Script friendly CLI - Read from stdin, jump to sections with --from, and share configuration files across machines.

Installation

Cargo. Requires Rust 1.95 or newer.

cargo install mdv

macOS and Linux. Supports x86_64 and ARM64.

curl -fsSL https://whosowsee.github.io/mdv/install.sh | sh

Windows. PowerShell 5.1 or PowerShell 7 on x64 and ARM64.

irm https://whosowsee.github.io/mdv/install.ps1 | iex

The scripts download the latest GitHub release and verify its SHA-256 digest. Rust is not required. Run the same command to update.

See the installation guide for RPM and Arch Linux packages, Nix, source builds, version selection and removal.

Quick start

mdv README.md                     # render a file
mdv --theme catppuccin README.md  # choose a theme
mdv --preset reader README.md     # apply a preset
mdv --monitor README.md           # re-render when the file changes
mdv -i                            # browse Markdown files in the current directory
cat notes.md | mdv                # read from a pipe

Run mdv --help for the full option list.

Configuration

Create a configuration file with mdv --init-config. CLI options have highest priority, followed by the --preset selection, the configuration file and built-in defaults. For color, MDV_COLOR takes priority over the preset and configuration file.

The built-in themes are terminal (default), solarized-dark, nord, tokyonight, kanagawa, gruvbox, monokai, material-ocean and catppuccin. The built-in presets are reader, compact, pretty and showcase. User themes and presets are YAML files in the configuration directory. See Themes and Presets for previews and file formats.

Themes

terminal

monokai

solarized-dark

nord

tokyonight

kanagawa

gruvbox

material-ocean

catppuccin

Documentation

Full documentation is on the project website.

• Getting started · Introduction, Installation, Usage
• Reading · Document browser, Pager and editor, Live monitoring
• Formatting · Layout and wrapping, Code blocks, Math, Callouts, Lists and checkboxes, Links and footnotes, Front matter, HTML
• Customization · Themes, Theme field reference, Presets, Custom syntaxes
• Reference · Configuration, YAML reference, Environment variables, Complete CLI reference

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md for issues and pull requests, and the AI Policy for AI-assisted contributions. The toolchain, just commands, tests, CI and the website sources are described in the development guide.

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