Arch Linux User Repository

@aik2

another tip of course is good old pandoc. It's big, huge, (AUR pandoc-bin) but its "--to ansi" does wonderfull things for terminal freaks.

Recently, december 2025, you can (in addition to docx) even "read" xlsx and pptx on the terminal ...

pandoc mypresentation.pptx --to-ansi | less

pandoc myspreadsheet.xlsx --to-ansi | less

Amazing beautiful !!!

https://pandoc.org/releases.html,

 pandoc 3.8.3 (2025-12-01)

  • Add xlsx (Microsoft Excel) as an input format (Anton Antich). Each
    worksheet turns into a section containing a table.
  • Add pptx (PowerPoint) as new input format (Anton Antich).

 pandoc 3.4 (2024-09-09)

  • New output format: ansi (for formatted console output) (Evan Silberman).
    Most Pandoc elements are supported and printed in a reasonable way, if not
    always ideally. This version does no detection of terminal capabilities,
    nor does it fall back to different output styles for less-capable
    terminals.

@aik2

Thanks for the tip ! Had a lot of trouble finding it on the AUR. The "Desc" doesnt include markdown, just says,

    A powerful extended cat command, to cat all the things you couldn't before

Still testing and evaluating it. Seems powerfull lotz of extra (hopefully not bloated stuff) ,

• https://github.com/Skardyy/mcat

Seems to be based on this powerfull crate/library "markdownify" with conversion of image/vid/pdf/docx/html, https://docs.rs/crate/markdownify/latest

markdownify is a Rust implementation inspired by Microsoft's markitdown Python
project. It provides functionality to convert various document formats to
Markdown, making them easier to view, share, and integrate into AI prompts.

• https://lib.rs/~Skardyy
• https://lib.rs/crates/markdownify
• https://github.com/Skardyy

The author, Skarddy, of the tool is also the maintainer of the PKGBUILD. Seems to be an Arch user. I left some comments here, https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/mcat-bin

@m040601 you may want to try https://github.com/Skardyy/mcat which has an AUR package mcat-bin. It renders markdown really nicely and has pager support.

@m040601: no, I don't know other colorizers, that's why I fixed mdcat. :-)

I just merged the AUR and package git and published it back. Currently it builds with minimal patching.

Hi andreas, thanks for the last patch on mdcat on the AUR. It's orphaned abandoned now ?

This "swsnr" mdcat, https://github.com/swsnr/mdcat, used to be in the Arch official repos, maintained by "Justin Kromlinger",

Name            : mdcat
Version         : 2.7.1-1
Description     : Sophisticated Markdown rendering for the terminal
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://github.com/swsnr/mdcat
Optional Deps   : less: for mdless [installed]
Installed Size  : 10.54 MiB
Packager        : Justin Kromlinger <hashworks@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Sun 15 Dec 2024 10:04:37 PM WET

Until today when it was removed. Sadly. I checked, https://github.com/swsnr/mdcat and indeed,

No longer maintained. If you wish to take over, send a mail to sebastian@swsnr.de.

He, swsnr, seems to be an Archlinux user and ison codeberg now,

https://codeberg.org/swsnr?tab=repositories
https://swsnr.de/

This fork, https://github.com/lunaryorn/mdcat seems also unmaintained.

Hope he, swsnr, or someone else picks it up again and it comes back as an official Arch packages.

There are many many other markdown TUI/CLI viewers, but this "mdcat" brings 2 binaries "mdcat" and "mdless" that crucialy play nice with LESS/LESSPIPE. That is you can pipe them to less and still get the colors and reformatting

@andreas

Do you happen to know any other markdown viewer/colorizer, that plays nice with less/lesspipe in the official Arch repos ?

I already checked,

• mdfried
• md-tui
• ... ???

But they are TUI/CLI's on their own. They are standalone tools. They have their own pager. They dont seem play nice piping with less/lesspipe.

PS: For others:

There is a slight difference between a "simple" markdown "colorizer" and one that does a little bit more reformatting. Dont confuse the 2 types.

• bat
• glow

Yes I know, bat, very robust and nice, and others, but does only colors, does no reformating.

Reformatting means, nicely reformats the links, markdown headers (###)

       mdcat renders Markdown FILEs in CommonMark dialect to text terminals
       with sophisticated formatting.  

       highlights syntax in code blocks, and shows inline links and even
       inline images in some terminal programs

And after the colorizing/reformating you can still pipe that result to less, and use still see the colors/reformatting. No need for an extra pager.