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Browsing folders of markdown files

If you are like me, you have a bunch of notes and documents written in markdown spread across many folders. Even the documentation of some projects involving many people is done this way and stored, for example, in a git repository. While it is easy to open the text editor to read these files, it is not the most pleasant experience, since the markup language was made to later generate readable documents in other formats (eg. HTML).

For many purposes setting up the required configuration of tools to generate documentation (like mkdocs) is not practical, neither it was the initial intent when it was written. So last weekend I took a couple of hours and built a rough (and dirty) tool to help me navigate and read the markdown documents with a more pleasant experience, using the browser (applying style as github).

I called it mdvis and it is available for download through “pip”. Here’s how working with it looks like:

It does not provide many features and is somewhat “green”, but it serves my current purposes. The program is open-source so you can check it here, in case you want to help improving it.

By Gonçalo Valério

Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.