marked-terminal

What is marked-terminal?

The marked-terminal package is a custom renderer for the marked library, allowing Markdown content to be rendered in the terminal. It converts Markdown into ANSI escape codes to display styled text and other elements directly in the command line interface. This is particularly useful for CLI applications that want to display rich text content or documentation in a more readable and visually appealing format.

What are marked-terminal's main functionalities?

Rendering Headers

This feature allows the rendering of Markdown headers in the terminal with appropriate styling to distinguish them from other text.

const TerminalRenderer = require('marked-terminal');
const marked = require('marked');

marked.setOptions({
  renderer: new TerminalRenderer()
});

console.log(marked('# Header 1'));
// This will output a styled Header 1 in the terminal

Rendering Links

This feature enables the display of clickable links in the terminal, making it easier to reference web resources directly from the command line output.

const TerminalRenderer = require('marked-terminal');
const marked = require('marked');

marked.setOptions({
  renderer: new TerminalRenderer()
});

console.log(marked('[GitHub](https://github.com)'));
// This will output the text 'GitHub' as a clickable link in the terminal, if supported, or display the URL next to the text.

Rendering Lists

This feature supports the rendering of bullet and numbered lists, enhancing the readability of list information in the terminal.

const TerminalRenderer = require('marked-terminal');
const marked = require('marked');

marked.setOptions({
  renderer: new TerminalRenderer()
});

console.log(marked('- Item 1\n- Item 2'));
// This will output a styled list with 'Item 1' and 'Item 2' as its elements.

Other packages similar to marked-terminal

chalk

Chalk is a popular npm package for styling terminal text with ANSI colors but does not directly support Markdown. Unlike marked-terminal, users need to manually specify styles for each piece of text.

ansi-styles

ansi-styles allows for styling terminal output with ANSI escape codes. It provides lower-level access to styling compared to marked-terminal, which abstracts Markdown rendering into styled terminal output.

cli-md

cli-md is a tool similar to marked-terminal that renders Markdown files in the terminal. It focuses on converting Markdown files to terminal output, similar to marked-terminal, but may have different rendering options and styles.

README

marked-terminal

Custom Renderer for marked allowing for printing Markdown to the Terminal. Supports pretty tables, syntax highlighting for javascript, and overriding all colors and styles.

Could for instance be used to print usage information.

Install

npm install marked marked-terminal

Example

var marked = require('marked');
var TerminalRenderer = require('../');

marked.setOptions({
  // Define custom renderer
  renderer: new TerminalRenderer()
});

// Show the parsed data
console.log(marked('# Hello \n This is **markdown** printed in the `terminal`'));

This will produce the following:

Syntax Highlighting

Also have support for syntax highlighting using cardinal. You can override highlight defaults by passing in settings as the second argument for TerminalRenderer, or you can create a .cardinalrc as defined in the cardinal README.

Example source

  ``js
  var foo = function(bar) {
    console.log(bar);
  };
  foo('Hello');
  ``

(But with proper syntax. Using "``" to avoid Github markdown)

// Show the parsed data
console.log(marked(exampleSource));

This will produce the following:

API

Constructur: new TerminalRenderer([options][, highlightOptions])

options

Optional Used to override default styling.

Default values are:

var defaultOptions = {
  code: chalk.yellow,
  blockquote: chalk.gray.italic,
  html: chalk.gray,
  heading: chalk.green.bold,
  firstHeading: chalk.magenta.underline.bold,
  hr: chalk.reset,
  listitem: chalk.reset,
  table: chalk.reset,
  paragraph: chalk.reset,
  strong: chalk.bold,
  em: chalk.italic,
  codespan: chalk.yellow,
  del: chalk.dim.gray.strikethrough,
  link: chalk.blue,
  href: chalk.blue.underline,

  // Wheter or not to undo marked escaping
  // of enitities (" -> " etc)
  unescape: true,

  // Options passed to cli-table
  tableOptions: {}
};

Example of overriding defaults

marked.setOptions({
  renderer: new TerminalRenderer({
    codespan: chalk.underline.magenta,
  })
});

highlightOptions

Options passed into cardinal. See readme there to see what options to pass.

See more examples