pmd — Print Markdown

Terminal Markdown renderer. Zero dependencies. One command.

pmd renders Markdown files directly in your terminal with ANSI colors and Unicode box-drawing characters. No browser, no GUI, no npm install. Just Python 3.9+ and pip install pmd-cli.

Quick start

pip install pmd-cli # or: pipx install pmd-cli
pmd README.md
cat doc.md | pmd    # stdin works too

Features

Headings — 6 levels with colors

No underlines, no # prefixes — just color and shape.

Inline formatting

• Bold **text**
• Italic *text*
• Bold-italic ***text***
• Strikethrough ~~text~~
• Code — bold green for visibility
• Links — blue underlined

Code blocks — bordered, language-tagged

┌ python ──────────────────
│ def hello():
│     print("world")
└──────────────────────────

Clean box borders, language label in the top frame. No syntax highlighting — just readable code.

Tables — autofit, cell wrapping, inline formatting

┌──────────┬───────┬─────────────────┐
│ Name     │ Age   │ City            │
├──────────┼───────┼─────────────────┤
│ Alice    │ 30    │ Beijing         │
│ Bob      │ 25    │ Shanghai        │
└──────────┴───────┴─────────────────┘

• Unicode box-drawing glyphs
• Columns autofit to content — compact by default
• Long cells wrap within their column
• Inline formatting (`code`, **bold**) preserved inside cells

Task lists

  ● Completed task
  ○ Pending task

GFM-style - [x] / - [ ] rendered as green filled / gray empty circles. Mix with regular list items freely.

Blockquotes

▎ Cyan bar + dimmed text
▎ Clean and compact

CJK / Emoji support

Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters measured at correct display width (2 columns). Table alignment and text wrapping work properly for mixed-script documents.

Why pmd?

pmd is the lightest option when you need markdown rendering on a server, container, CI runner, or air-gapped machine where installing compilers or heavy packages isn't practical.

Alternatives vs. built-in less / cat

These show raw markdown source:

# Heading                ← looks like a comment
**bold** *italic*        ← noise characters everywhere
| table | columns |      ← misaligned without rendering

pmd shows the rendered document — the way it was meant to be read.

Install

pip install pmd-cli          # system-wide
pip install --user pmd-cli   # user only
pipx install pmd-cli         # isolated CLI (recommended)

Python 3.9 or later. No other dependencies.

Usage

# File
pmd README.md

# Stdin
curl -s https://example.com/doc.md | pmd

# From clipboard (macOS)
pbpaste | pmd

# From clipboard (Linux)
xclip -o | pmd

Project structure

src/pmd/
  __init__.py      # version
  __main__.py      # parser + renderer (~850 lines)
pyproject.toml     # pip metadata

Single-file core — easy to vendor, fork, or embed.

License

MIT