glow
A terminal-based markdown reader designed for the CLI. Render markdown beautifully in your terminal.
Glow is a terminal-based markdown reader designed to bring beauty and power to the command line interface. It allows users to discover and read markdown files with style, automatically finding local markdown files in subdirectories or within Git repositories. The tool renders markdown with attractive formatting and syntax highlighting, making documentation more pleasant to read directly in the terminal.
Glow operates in two modes: as a Terminal User Interface (TUI) for browsing and reading markdown files interactively, and as a traditional CLI tool for quick formatting and display. The TUI mode provides a high-performance pager with familiar navigation keystrokes similar to 'less', while the CLI mode supports reading from files, stdin, URLs, and even fetching READMEs directly from GitHub or GitLab repositories.
The tool is highly customizable, offering multiple built-in themes that automatically adapt to your terminal's background color, support for custom JSON stylesheets, configurable word wrapping, and integration with your preferred pager. Users can create configuration files to set default preferences, making it ideal for developers, technical writers, and anyone who frequently works with markdown documentation in terminal environments.
Installation
# via Homebrew
brew install glow
# via APT (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://repo.charm.sh/apt/gpg.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/charm.gpg] https://repo.charm.sh/apt/ * *" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/charm.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install glow
# via Go
go install github.com/charmbracelet/glow/v2@latest
