tmd - Tiny Markdown

^{Social Media Photo by Pinakeen Bhatt on Unsplash}

Available in AUR

This module can now be installed via AUR as tmd-git package.

Video Demo:

On YouTube

Description:

Markdown is a very simple, and popular, markup language, used to write emails, or documents, like this very same one.

The goal of this project is to bring the ease of markdown to any terminal, console, or shell.

Why am I doing this?

• most Markdown parsers are based on regular expressions ( -aka: RegExp- ).
• not all platforms ( -micro controllers, your terminal- ) support RegExp out of the box.
• RegExp libraries are usually big and memory greedy, not always and option in constrained hardware.

So here there's this tiny markdown parser that works natively, wherever C is available, based on a single pass, with recursive calls, for nested parsing, output normalization, and cross platform features, wherever supported.

What kind of challenges did I encounter in writing this software?

• ensure that all commands actually work cross platform (macOS, Windows, Linux)
• ensure that nested parts of the content can be recursively parsed within their boundaries
• ensure that there are no memory leaks whatsoever, despite the huge amount of strings manipulation and operations
• implements a lot of strings functionalities such as slice, trim_start, trim_end, trim combined, and index_of with multiple chars
• try to normalize the outcome in every terminal, including a forced homogenous multiline code background and color
• understand how piping works in C, beside reading documents as explained during the training
• keeping performance under control, through a single pass with look ahead and look behind when needed
• ensure that in the worst case scenario, the layout is cleaned up once the program exits

Who would actually benefit from this project?

• anyone writing CLI with a desire to provide better documentation within the --help flag
• anyone using CLI most of the time, happy to have a visually enhanced experience
• anyone using any other programming language with a desire to show better outputs in CLI

Tests

* *style50* passes
* *valgrind* passes with or without arguments
* use `make test` or `make style`, if in CS50 IDE, or `make heap`
* this file is used itself as a test for this program

Features

• bold, underlined, -dimmed-, and, for Linux only, striked text.

    *bold* / **bold**
    _underlined_ / __underlined__
    -dimmed- / --dimmed--
    ~striked~ / ~~striked~~

• inline code, but also multiline

    inline `code` and multiline:

    ```
    code
    ```

• # Header 1 or ## Header X text

    # Header 1

    ## Header X
    ### Header X

• * bullets lists

    * bullet 1
    * bullet X

• links

    [link title](https://example.com)

but also ...

quoted text

    > quoted
    > > quoted nested
    >> also quoted nested
    > quoted

tmd - How To Use it

The ./tmd executable created via Make will either parse piped content or a specific file.

# pipe through any content
cat file.md | ./tmd

# or specify a file to parse
./tmd file.md

# or simply pass some content
./tmd 'Hello *World*!'

The parsed output will be shown right away.