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glow(1)

Render markdown files and stdin to the terminal with syntax highlighting and formatting.

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Synopsis

glow [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Description

Glow is a markdown renderer for the terminal that converts markdown documents to beautifully formatted output with colors, bold, italics, and proper spacing. It supports reading from files or stdin, making it useful for viewing README files, documentation, and formatted text in the terminal.

Without arguments, glow enters interactive mode where you can browse local markdown files. Pipe markdown content to glow or specify file paths to render them directly.

Common options

FlagWhat it does
-p, --pagerdisplay output in a pager (less) for scrolling through long documents
-s, --style STYLEchoose color style (dark, light, notty); auto-detect by default
-w WIDTH, --width WIDTHwrap output to specified character width (default: terminal width)
-l, --line-numbersdisplay line numbers for code blocks
--no-pagerdisable pager; output directly to stdout
-j, --jsonoutput as JSON instead of rendering to terminal
--helpshow help message and exit
--versionshow version number and exit

Examples

render a markdown file to the terminal with formatting and colors

glow README.md

pipe markdown content from a file into glow for rendering

cat file.md | glow

render markdown and pipe through a pager for scrolling through long files

glow -p README.md

render markdown using a light color scheme suitable for light terminals

glow -s light docs/guide.md

render markdown wrapped to 80 characters per line

glow -w 80 article.md

enter interactive mode to browse and select markdown files in current directory

glow

render markdown with line numbers shown in code blocks

glow -l code-doc.md

fetch and render markdown from a remote URL via pipe

curl https://example.com/file.md | glow

Related commands