glow

Glow is a command-line tool that renders Markdown — a lightweight text formatting language — beautifully inside your terminal. Normally, Markdown files look like plain text cluttered with symbols (asterisks for bold, hashes for headings, brackets for links). Glow renders them with proper formatting, colors, and styling, making documentation genuinely readable without opening a browser or editor.

You can use it two ways. Run glow on a specific file, pipe text into it, or even point it at a GitHub URL to fetch and render a README directly in your terminal. Alternatively, run glow without any arguments to launch an interactive text-based browser that automatically finds all Markdown files in your current directory or Git repository, so you can navigate and read them like a mini documentation viewer. It auto-detects whether your terminal has a dark or light background and picks an appropriate color scheme, though you can override this or supply a custom style.

You'd reach for Glow when you want to read documentation, READMEs, or notes in the terminal without switching context to a browser, or when you're working in a remote server environment without a graphical interface. It installs via Homebrew, most Linux package managers, Windows package managers, Scoop, Chocolatey, or as a Go binary. Built in Go by Charmbracelet.