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Glow — terminal Markdown reader

charmbracelet/glow renders Markdown in the terminal with syntax highlighting and pager support. In this repo it powers the tmux cheatsheet popup and the readurl / readlocal web-reader pipeline.

  • Install:
  • macOS — Homebrew (managed by dot_ansible/roles/devtools/tasks/main.yml macOS list)
  • Linux — GitHub release tarball into ~/.local/bin/glow (managed by dot_ansible/roles/devtools/tasks/main.yml # --- glow --- block)
  • Used by:
  • tmux popup menu cheatsheet — prefix + Space → ? (see dot_config/tmux/executable_menu.sh)
  • Web reader pipeline — readurl / readlocal / readnode / readraw (see Web reader)
  • aicapture agent output rendering when stdout is markdown-shaped

Daily commands

# Render a file with the pager (q to quit, j/k to scroll)
glow -p README.md

# Render a remote file
glow https://raw.githubusercontent.com/foo/bar/main/README.md

# Pipe markdown through (no pager, just rendered)
echo '# hello\n- a\n- b' | glow

# Width-constrained for narrow terminals
glow -w 80 README.md

# Choose a style explicitly
glow -s dark README.md     # dark | light | notty | <path-to-json>

The pager (-p) uses the same bat-style scroll keys most of the team already knows, so glow -p file.md is the closest equivalent to bat README.md for prose.

This repo doesn't bind a global glow alias because the various callers (tmux cheatsheet, web reader) call it directly with the right flags. If you want a personal alias, add it to a private zsh fragment:

# ~/.config/zsh/tools/99_local.zsh (gitignored)
alias mdv='glow -p'
alias mdvw='glow -w "$(($(tput cols) - 4))" -p'

Tips

  • TUI mode — glow (no args) launches a TUI file browser for the current directory; arrow keys to navigate, Enter to open. Use glow -a to also list dotfiles.
  • Stash — Charm offers a hosted stash for marking docs you read often. We don't use the hosted side; if you do, glow stash add <file> and glow stash to list.
  • Style files — Glow accepts a path to a JSON style for full theming. The repo's tmux cheatsheet relies on the default dark style, which works on both Catppuccin and tmux2k tmux themes.
  • Fallback — When glow isn't installed (e.g., during early bootstrap on a new machine), the tmux menu falls back to less. See dot_config/tmux/executable_menu.sh row Cheatsheet for the glow … 2>/dev/null || less … pattern.

See also