streamdown 0.19.0

A streaming markdown renderer for modern terminals with syntax highlighting

Terminal streaming markdown that rocks

Streamdown works with simonw's llm along with any other streaming markdown, even something basic like curl. It supports standard piping like any normal pager and a clean execvp option for robustly wrapping around interactive programs with readline or their own ANSI stuff to manage.

$ pip install streamdown

Provides clean copyable code for long code lines

Other renderers inject line breaks when copying code that wraps around. We're better and now you are too! Tip: You can make things prettier if you don't mind if this guarantee is broken. See the PrettyBroken flag below!

Supports images

Here's kitty and alacritty.

Supports hyperlinks (OSC 8) and clipboard (OSC 52)

links.webm

Supports tables

As well as everything else...

...even CJK

Compare how streamdown wraps around and spaces this tabular Chinese description of programming languages to the same file using glow.

Colors are highly (and quickly) configurable for people who care a lot, or just a little.

Has a Plugin system to extend the parser and renderer.

For instance, here is the latex plugin doing math inside a table:

TOML Configuration

It's located at ~/.config/streamdown/config.toml (following the XDG Base Directory Specification). If this file does not exist upon first run, it will be created with default values.

Here are the sections:

[style]

Defines the base Hue (H), Saturation (S), and Value (V) from which all other palette colors are derived. The defaults are at the beginning of the source.

• HSV: [ 0.0 - 1.0, 0.0 - 1.0, 0.0 - 1.0 ]
• Dark: Multipliers for background elements, code blocks.
• Grey: Multipliers for blockquote and thinkblock.
• Mid: Multipliers for inline code backgrounds, table headers.
• Symbol: Multipliers for list bullets, horizontal rules, links.
• Head: Multipliers for level 3 headers.
• Bright: Multipliers for level 2 headers.
• Margin (integer, default: 2): The left and right indent for the output.
• Width (integer, default: 0): Along with the Margin, Width specifies the base width of the content, which when set to 0, means use the terminal width. See #6 for more details
• PrettyPad (boolean, default: false): Uses a unicode vertical pad trick to add a half height background to code blocks. This makes copy/paste have artifacts. See #2. I like it on. But that's just me
• PrettyBroken (boolean, default: false): This will break the copy/paste assurance above. The output is much prettier, but it's also broken. So it's pretty broken. Works nicely with PrettyPad.
• ListIndent (integer, default: 2): This is the recursive indent for the list styles.
• Syntax (string, default monokai): This is the syntax highlighting theme which come via pygments.

Example:

[style]
PrettyPad = true
PrettyBroken = true
HSV = [0.7, 0.5, 0.5]
Dark = { H = 1.0, S = 1.2, V = 0.25 } # Make dark elements less saturated and darker
Symbol = { H = 1.0, S = 1.8, V = 1.8 } # Make symbols more vibrant

[features]

Controls optional features:

• CodeSpaces (boolean, default: true): Enables detection of code blocks indented with 4 spaces. Set to false to disable this detection method (triple-backtick blocks still work).
• Clipboard (boolean, default: true): Enables copying the last code block encountered to the system clipboard using OSC 52 escape sequences upon exit. Set to false to disable.
• Logging (boolean, default: false): Enables logging to tmpdir (/tmp/sd) of the raw markdown for debugging and bug reporting. The logging uses an emoji as a record separator so the actual streaming delays can be simulated and replayed. If you use the filename based invocation, that is to say, sd <filename>, this type of logging is always off.
• Savebrace (boolean, default: true): Saves the code blocks of a conversation to the append file /tmp/sd/savebrace so you can fzf or whatever you want through it. See how it's used in my llmehelp scripts, specifically screen-query and sd-picker.

Example:

[features]
CodeSpaces = false
Clipboard = false

Command Line

The most exciting feature here is --exec with it you can do full readline support like this:

 $ sd --exec "llm chat"

And now you have all your readline stuff. It's pretty great.

Streamdown - A markdown renderer for modern terminals

positional arguments:
  filenameList          Input file to process (also takes stdin)

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -l LOGLEVEL, --loglevel LOGLEVEL
                        Set the logging level
  -c COLOR, --color COLOR
                        Set the hsv base: h,s,v
  -w WIDTH, --width WIDTH
                        Set the width
  -e EXEC, --exec EXEC  Wrap a program for more 'proper' i/o handling

Demo

Do this

$ ./streamdown/sd.py tests/*md

Install from source

After the git clone least one of these should work, hopefully. it's using the modern uv pip tool but is also backwards compatible to the pip3 install -r requirements.txt flow.

$ pipx install -e .
$ pip install -e .
$ uv pip install -e . 

Future work

Glow styles

I'm going to try to be compatible with other popular markdown styles to help for a smoother transition. Glow compatible json sheets is on my radar. There's also mdless and frogmouth. Might be others