preview-markup 0.3.3

Installation

The preview-markup program is written in Python and is available on PyPI which means installation should be as simple as:

$ pip install preview-markup

There’s actually a multitude of ways to install Python packages (e.g. the per user site-packages directory, virtual environments or just installing system wide) and I have no intention of getting into that discussion here, so if this intimidates you then read up on your options before returning to these instructions ;-).

$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev

Getting started

To get started you simply run the command preview-markup. If you give it a filename as an argument then that file will be previewed, otherwise the README.md or README.rst file in the current working directory is previewed.

If you want to run preview-markup in the background then you probably won’t appreciate the logging to the terminal that is enabled by default. In this case I suggest you use the following command line:

$ preview-markup -q &

The -q is short for --quiet and the & instructs your shell to run the program in the background. If you want to kill the program later on just run the fg command (this will bring the program back to the foreground) and then press Control-C (this will kill the program).

Future improvements

Some random ideas for future improvements (I may implement these as time permits or when I feel like programming but don’t feel like picking up one of my many other projects):

Automatically close orphaned windows

When the command line program is terminated the browser window or tab page that was previously opened should be closed automatically. This can probably be implemented using a JavaScript call to the server to check if the server is still alive, if not then just call window.close().

Instant updates instead of meta refresh

Right now there’s a hard coded 10 second meta refresh in the HTML template. It would be a lot more elegant if the server used inotify or something similar to instantly detect changes and push those to the browser client. For now the meta refresh achieves the main goal though :-).

Why this project?

Different variations of preview-markup have lived in my private dotfiles repository for years now (I track ~/bin in my dotfiles repository). Over those years the program has had several names and very similar yet slightly different purposes. By the time I decided to clean up these “variations on a similar theme” I was using several different shell and Python scripts working together to do the same things that preview-markup now does. I decided to merge, cleanup, document and publish that mess of Python and shell scripts for multiple reasons:

1. I wanted to merge all of the features that I’d grown to appreciate into a single coherent piece of software that was easy and intuitive to use (and written in Python so I could more easily maintain it :-).

2. I wanted to manage the installation of that software as a Python package with properly specified dependencies where a single pip install was enough to get things going.

3. Last but not least: Given the effort I’d already put into it, it seemed a shame not to share my work with the world.

Contact

The latest version of preview-markup is available on PyPI and GitHub. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at peter@peterodding.com.

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2018 Peter Odding.