https://mddog.pages.dev

Hi HN! I (for better or worse) live in the terminal and look at Markdown files a lot for work.

To read Markdown, it seems like we have two choices: (1) use a GUI like VS Code and Obsidian to preview them, which takes me away from the terminal, or (2) use a terminal Markdown viewer like glow and leaf, which doesn't render them in their true form.

So I made mddog (inspired by mdcat!). It basically works by building out the Markdown into its real format using macOS built-in engines like CoreText and CoreGraphics, then send the outputs to the terminal as images. The result is that we can view real Markdown format right in the terminal.

I spent a month learning basic Rust, another two weeks using AI to iterate on the design and test different approaches for the best performance, then another two weeks on the final build.

I hired a human designer to create the dog logo. His name is Spike, named after the dog in my favorite cartoon growing up, Tom & Jerry.

Give mddog a try and let me know what you think!