Bat: Display Markdown files in the Terminal

[josuablejeru]

Thank you for your work... my Colleges are impressed by my new "Cat" tool I'm always using 😄

I was thinking lately it would be cool if bat can parse the .md files and displays them in the Terminal as we look on a README.md on Github with all the titles and code snippets formatted and styled.

My experience with Rust and parsers is very low (I'm currently reading a book on Rust) and it would take some time for me to implement this feature so anyone can take this idea an implement it! But if no one will do it I will give my best 😄

Any comment or feedback is appreciated!

[keith-hall]

related: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/963

[eth-p]

Syntax highlighting for code blocks are actually supported already, but it's currently broken due to changes in an upstream dependency.

The other markdown features are a bit more tricky, though. We could preprocess most of the markdown syntax (headings, bold, italic, underline, inline code, lists, quotes) into an ASCII representation of the rendered markdown, but not all terminals are going to be able to support bold, italic, or underlined characters. For example, some of them consider the sequence for bold (\ESC[1m) to be non-bold bright colors, and others just silently ignore italics (\ESC[3m) or treat them as inverted foreground/background.

I do like the idea, but I'm not sure how widely supported the required terminal features are.

[josuablejeru]

We could make this feature optional.... most CLI tools allow the user to decide how they want the output. Most Emulators like iTerm2 and Hyper have full support for this as I know.

Thank you very much for your feedback!

[sharkdp]

Syntax highlighting for code blocks are actually supported already, but it's currently broken due to changes in an upstream dependency.

It's not just the code blocks that were broken. This affected other features of the Markdown syntax as well. I have now fixed #963 by patching the Markdown syntax.

Before:

After the fix:

I think this pretty much what you wanted, @josuablejeru? (the fix has been released as v0.15.1).

[josuablejeru]

Hallo @sharkdp thank you for your response!

I was more thinking about presenting of markdown files like they are displayed by Github.

*italic* should becomes italic
`code` becomes code

Header: ### Header

But if this is not the scope of your tool I understand this and I will look to build maybe a dedicated tool then.

[sharkdp]

You are probably looking for something like https://github.com/lunaryorn/mdcat

[josuablejeru]

Thank you for your suggestion and nice support!