mdv

A lean, read-only, interactive terminal Markdown viewer, written in Rust.

mdv opens a Markdown file and lets you scroll through it in your terminal — no editor, no browser. It never writes to the file it opens.

Features

• Headings, paragraphs, and inline formatting — bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code, links, and image placeholders.
• Fenced and indented code blocks, set off by a gutter, labelled with the language when the fence declares one.
• Nested blockquotes, and nested ordered, unordered, and task lists.
• Box-drawing tables with per-column alignment and in-cell wrapping.
• Footnotes collected at the end of the document, and raw HTML printed verbatim rather than interpreted.
• Text search: / opens the prompt, Enter runs the query, every match on screen is highlighted, and n / N cycle through them. Matching is case-insensitive.
• A table-of-contents overlay (t) to jump to any heading.
• Re-wraps the document to the new width when the terminal is resized.

Install

There are no published binaries yet — mdv is built from source, so you need a Rust toolchain (rustup).

git clone https://github.com/mrcmilano/mdv.git
cd mdv
cargo install --locked --path .

That puts mdv on your PATH. If you only want the binary, build it instead and pick it up from target/release/ (mdv, or mdv.exe on Windows):

cargo build --locked --release

Tested on Linux, macOS, and Windows — CI runs the test suite on all three.

Usage

mdv <FILE>
mdv --help | -h
mdv --version | -V

Keybindings (Normal mode)

Key	Action
j, ↓	scroll down 1 line
k, ↑	scroll up 1 line
d, PageDown, Space	scroll down half a screen
u, PageUp	scroll up half a screen
g, Home	go to top
G, End	go to bottom
t	toggle TOC overlay
/	start search input
n / N	next / previous search match
Esc	close overlay / cancel search input / clear search highlights
q, Ctrl-C	quit

SearchInput and Toc modes override these keys — see docs/mdv-build-plan.md Section 6 for the full interaction model.

Known issues

• Fenced code blocks tagged with the text language have been reported as not rendering as expected — #14.

Anything else you run into is worth reporting on the issue tracker.

Development

Want to contribute? See CONTRIBUTING.md.

cargo build                                # debug build
cargo test                                 # all tests
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings  # must be clean
cargo fmt                                  # format

License

MIT — see LICENSE.