Glow: The Essential CLI Tool for Reading and Managing Technical Markdown
glow is a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that renders Markdown files directly in your terminal. As a software engineer, you work with Markdown constantly
README.md files, documentation, meeting notes, project specs, and more.
Here's how glow can make your life easier
Quick Documentation Review
Instead of opening a web browser or a text editor to read a README.md or a project's documentation, you can view it beautifully formatted right in your terminal, which keeps your focus on the command line.
Enhanced Readability
Standard terminal output for a Markdown file is just plain text. glow applies syntax highlighting, proper heading sizes, bolding, lists, and code block formatting, making large documents much easier to read quickly.
Navigate and Search
glow offers a tui (Text User Interface) mode that lets you browse local and remote Markdown files, even those stored in GitHub's Gists, providing a unified viewer for your technical notes.
In short, it helps you consume and manage your documentation more efficiently and pleasantly without leaving your primary working environment
the terminal.
glow is very easy to install since it's written in Go. You can use several common package managers.
This is usually the simplest way on a Mac or many Linux distributions
brew install glow
If you have the Go toolchain set up
go install github.com/charmbracelet/glow@latest
(Make sure your $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH for this to work.)
You can also download a pre-compiled binary for your specific operating system directly from the [charmbracelet/glow GitHub releases page].
Once installed, using glow is straightforward.
To render any Markdown file in your current directory
glow README.md
This command will output the contents of README.md to your terminal, beautifully formatted with colors and proper layout.
If you run glow without any arguments, it launches a powerful interactive TUI interface
glow
This interface allows you to
Browse Local Files
See a list of Markdown files in your current directory.
Access Gists
Log in to GitHub to access your saved Gists (a great place for code snippets and quick notes).
Search
Filter and search through your documents.
A highly useful trick for engineers is piping output from another command into glow. This is perfect for reviewing generated files or checking documentation snippets on the fly.
Example
Reviewing a Git Commit Message
Let's say you write a detailed commit message in a temporary Markdown file (temp-commit.md) and want to quickly preview how it looks formatted before committing
cat temp-commit.md | glow
Example
Rendering Code Snippets
If you have a function or script you want to document in a Markdown block
# Echo a Markdown code block, then render it with glow
echo '
## Utility Function
```go
func Hello() {
fmt.Println("World")
}
This will render a heading and a nicely syntax-highlighted Go code block directly in your terminal, which is incredibly useful for testing documentation styling or quickly sharing formatted text.
Would you like me to elaborate on a specific feature of `glow`, or perhaps look for other useful CLI tools from the `charmbracelet` suite?
