mdriver

A fast, beautiful, streaming markdown renderer for the terminal that prints markdown and uses the facilities of modern terminals to make it as interactive as possible.

Features

Streaming output

mdriver prints markdown as it arrives, rather than waiting for the document to complete before printing it.

Pipe your llm output through it, or a markdown file from the web, and it will display it as soon as it can.

Beautiful display

mdriver strives to present attractive, colorful output in the terminal

Modern terminal features

mdriver will:

display images referenced in markdown in your terminal that supports the kitty protocol (kitty, ghostty, alacritty, and others)
syntax-highlight fenced code blocks for many languages using syntect
render mermaid diagrams into images and display them in your terminal
parse a subset of HTML and display it sensibly in the terminal
accept input from stdin, files, or URLs
Use OSC8 hyperlinks to make links clickable

Installation

Using Homebrew (macOS)

brew install llimllib/tap/mdriver

From crates.io

cargo install mdriver

From Pre-built Binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the GitHub Releases page:

Linux: mdriver-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
macOS: mdriver-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz (Intel) or mdriver-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz (Apple Silicon)

(want windows? help me out)

Extract mdriver and add it to your PATH:

tar xzf mdriver-*.tar.gz
sudo mv mdriver /usr/local/bin/

From Source

git clone https://github.com/llimllib/mdriver.git
cd mdriver
cargo build --release

The binary will be available at target/release/mdriver.

Usage

# Read from file
mdriver README.md

# Pipe markdown from a file
cat document.md | mdriver

# Pipe from echo
echo "# Hello World" | mdriver

# Redirect from file
mdriver < document.md

# Use a specific syntax highlighting theme
mdriver --theme "InspiredGitHub" README.md

# Set default theme via environment variable
MDRIVER_THEME="Solarized (dark)" mdriver README.md

# List available themes
mdriver --list-themes

# Render images using kitty graphics protocol
mdriver --images kitty document.md

# Control color output (auto, always, never)
mdriver --color=always README.md | less -R

# Show help
mdriver --help

Syntax Highlighting Themes

mdriver uses the syntect library for syntax highlighting, supporting 100+ languages with customizable color themes.

Available Themes

Use mdriver --list-themes to see all available themes. Popular options include:

InspiredGitHub - Bright, vibrant colors inspired by GitHub’s syntax highlighting
Solarized (dark) - The classic Solarized dark color scheme
Solarized (light) - Solarized optimized for light backgrounds
base16-ocean.dark - Calm oceanic colors (default)
base16-mocha.dark - Warm mocha tones
base16-eighties.dark - Retro 80s aesthetic

Setting a Theme

There are three ways to configure the theme (in order of precedence):

Command-line flag: mdriver --theme "InspiredGitHub" file.md
Environment variable: export MDRIVER_THEME="Solarized (dark)"
Default: base16-ocean.dark

Example

# Use InspiredGitHub theme
mdriver --theme "InspiredGitHub" README.md

# Set environment variable for persistent default
export MDRIVER_THEME="Solarized (dark)"
mdriver README.md

# Combine with piping
MDRIVER_THEME="base16-mocha.dark" cat file.md | mdriver

Image Rendering

mdriver can render images inline in your terminal using the kitty graphics protocol. This feature works with any terminal that supports the kitty graphics protocol (kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, etc.).

In terminals without image support, images will display as alt text.

Use the --images kitty flag to enable image display:

# Render local images
mdriver --images kitty document.md

# Works with remote URLs
echo "![Logo](https://example.com/logo.png)" | mdriver --images kitty

# Combine with theme selection
mdriver --theme "InspiredGitHub" --images kitty README.md

Image Features

Auto-resize: Images automatically resize to fit terminal width while preserving aspect ratio
Remote URLs: Fetches and displays images from HTTP/HTTPS URLs
Graceful fallback: Shows alt text when image fails to load
Backward compatible: Without --images flag, images render as plain text ![alt](src)
Extensible: Architecture supports future protocols (sixel, iTerm2, etc.)

Color Output Control

By default, mdriver automatically detects whether to use ANSI colors based on whether stdout is a terminal. You can override this behavior with the --color flag.

Color Modes

Mode	Description
`auto`	Use colors only when stdout is a terminal (default)
`always`	Always emit ANSI color codes, even when piping
`never`	Never use colors

Development

This code is written almost entirely by an LLM. It started as an experiment in LLM-driven usage and I’ve found it to be successful so far; I use mdriver every day and it’s been very useful to me.

I can read rust, but I don’t really have aesthetic opinions on it; I chose to build this in rust for that reason. Quality is mainly enforced by a thorough test suite and static checks, as well as my own opinions about how CLI programs ought to behave.

I care about binary size, and have disabled as many features from imported libraries as possible, and avoided libraries where possible, with the proviso that this is intended to be a featureful application rather than a minimal one. As of this writing it is 8.1mb.

Static checks & tests

See docs/conformance.md for details on the test suite

# All must pass before committing:
cargo fmt                                                # Format code
cargo build                                              # No warnings
cargo build --release                                    # No warnings
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings # No errors
cargo test                                               # All tests pass

See CLAUDE.md for comprehensive development guidelines and best practices.

Contributing

Fork the repository
Create a feature branch
Write tests first
Implement feature to pass tests
Ensure all quality checks pass
Submit pull request

License

MIT