Announcing frm

I just open sourced a Bash script I’ve been using a lot lately to render Markdown files. It runs on Linux and (with a little setup) MacOS. I’ll just quote the project’s README to explain my motivation for creating it:

There are many great Markdown viewers out there. Unfortunately, those tools always come with limitations on what Markdown syntax they know how to render and how nicely they can render it. This is because…

• there are multiple standards that define Markdown syntax
• Markdown can contain arbitrary HTML
• viewers are limited by the capabilities of the environments they run in

frm solves these issues by using Pandoc to convert Markdown files to HTML pages, then opening those pages with your default program for HTML (which is usually a web browser).

frm isn’t meant to be the last (or fastest) Markdown viewer you’ll ever use. Viewers that render directly to the terminal or that are built-in to an application you’re already using often provide a quicker/more convenient experience that does a good enough job most the time. Conversely, frm excels at rendering the many syntaxes and custom HTML you might find in Markdown files and leveraging the power of CSS to make content look amazing ✨️.

You can find installation instructions, usage examples, contributing guidelines, and the script itself in the frm project repo.