Light Markdown Renderer

Dependency free renderer for a subset of markdown to the terminal - w/o going via HTML (i.e. no html markup support) - sloc (w/o comments) around 100, i.e. adaptable, extendable

This one is intended soleley to hilite somewhat “lightly” structured text reasonably swift. Ideal for highlighting doc strings or CLI command help, where you don’t want to install markdown libs to do that first - e.g. in new containers.

In no way this is useable as a full markdown document viewer, alone for the missing html support.

A real use case are bash scripts, where you repeatedly want to output formatted stuff, e.g. in a loop. Then, a very lightweight tool (short startup time for the python process) is desirable. Note: There are unix standard tool based renderers around, with good results, check them out (and if only to see how awesome sed really is…). They did not work for me for some output related problems - but they might for you.

Originally the script was within a Here Document within bash scripts but this version would be also useable inline in a python programs. Thats why some overhead for config mgmt is present - for a version embedded in e.g. a bash script you would only need the main function and replace the C.<color> with the shell eviron vars, e.g. C.H1 -> $H1

Design

We assume the soure is already formatted with care and mdvl’s main jobs are the coloring and the wrapping. Meaning that the source is formatted to be readable in environments w/o coloring and structure aware wrapping, specifically docstrings in source code editors.

Usage

mdvl(source_markdown, **config)

cat README.md | ./mdvl.py

./mdv.py '''# Hello'''
./mdv.py README.md

‘Installation’

wget -q https://raw.githubusercontent.com/axiros/mdvl/master/mdvl.py

Yes, that url supports version pinning.

If you absolutely feel better with 10 files instead of one then do:

pip[3] install mdvl

Remember: This is not a very feature rich renderer. If you anyway
already have pip on the system you want a real viewer, e.g. mdv.

Configuration / Features

Restricted set of md. This readme pretty much has them all in.

This is how the default output looks with default config.

Check attributes of classes `Facts <https://github.com/axiros/mdvl/blob/master/mdvl.py#L61>`__ and `Colors <https://github.com/axiros/mdvl/blob/master/mdvl.py#L30>`__. Those you can deliver as kw args or via environ. e.g.:

set -a; H1=171; H2=54; term_width=50; header_numbering=-1; set +a
./mdvl.py README.md

fenced code - or indented code
w/o syntax highlighting though

# python -m timeit "import os; os.system('python -c \"i=1\"')"
100 loops, best of 3: 10 msec per loop
# python -m timeit "import os; os.system('python3 -c \"i=1\"')"
100 loops, best of 3: 18.1 msec per loop
# python -m timeit "import os; os.system('python -Ssc \"i=1\"')"
100 loops, best of 3: 4.2 msec per loop
# python -m timeit "import os; os.system('python3 -Ssc \"i=1\"')"
100 loops, best of 3: 10.6 msec per loop