Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#31

Post by submeta » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

pigsinzen wrote: post #10

Nice idea! I’m excited to check it out. I write a lot of docs in Markdown and this could be a great way to browse them. Out of curiosity, have you seen glow[0]? [0] https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow

Wow, glow looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#32

Post by kbd » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

StarlaAtNight wrote: post #4

I'm a big fan of the Markdown Preview feature in VS Code Honest question: why do developers insist so much on using command line based tools? What's the advantage over using an IDE? (e.g. VS Code or PyCharm)

Had this discussion recently with someone advocating IDE debuggers over CLI debuggers. I'm like, don't you realize that the CLI debugger is used underneath inside your IDE? And by using it from the CLI you get an entire HISTORY of your debug sessions you can refer to.

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#33

Post by sitkack » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:44 PM UTC

Could one use this for epubs?

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#34

Post by kjs3 » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

I like it. Let's see how it feels over time.

You might consider Sixel support as a way of doing images. There are a number of excellent libraries that support it.

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#35

Post by linsomniac » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

willm wrote: post #21

jlowin wrote: post #18

Nice! Is there a story behind the name Frogmouth?

We're using bird names as a convention for our projects. Which may or may not be the name of the apps. Frogmouth felt more memorable than "mdbrowser" or "markdown-view"

This may just be a personal quirk, but many of these sorts of names to me seem to be one-way memorable. Like, if I see a future reference to "frogmouth" I probably will think "Oh yeah, I've heard of that." I may or may not remember that it's a markdown browser. But if I'm trying to remember "that markdown browser I saw a while ago", I can rarely pull out the name "frogmouth".

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#36

Post by linsomniac » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #25

dmeybohm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to prefer Vim but moved to using IDEs. In professional development, you want to use the best tools - a forklift vs. a shovel. I don’t think text editors are the best tool for that, but why do programmers insist on using worse tools? From my previous experience, I’d guess it’s these psychological factors: 1. IDEs have more cognitive overhead, and programmers have to keep a lot of state in their heads. So using…

> 3. A lot of programmers have a sense of elitism, and using text-based tools looks retro and more intimidating to those not familiar with it. In so doing, this validates the view of oneself as a member of a priestly class of text-slinging wizards. That's usually what I hear from people finding out I like/use Vim. It's like they can't come to peace with the fact that I like it for its bindings and plugins, no, it has…

vi is a pretty effective byte-code for communicating what is in my brain into what is on the screen. Kind of like a protobuf for text editing.

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#37

Post by linsomniac » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

dmeybohm wrote: post #19

StarlaAtNight wrote: post #4

I'm a big fan of the Markdown Preview feature in VS Code Honest question: why do developers insist so much on using command line based tools? What's the advantage over using an IDE? (e.g. VS Code or PyCharm)

I used to prefer Vim but moved to using IDEs. In professional development, you want to use the best tools - a forklift vs. a shovel. I don’t think text editors are the best tool for that, but why do programmers insist on using worse tools? From my previous experience, I’d guess it’s these psychological factors: 1. IDEs have more cognitive overhead, and programmers have to keep a lot of state in their heads. So using…

>...worse code completion

Have you tried LSP, say like in a LunarVIM or AstroVIM setup? These are self-contained packagings so you don't have to fiddle around with plugins (though you can also achieve the same results through plugins), and as I understand it you get the same code completion and intelligence you get in VSCode.

Re: Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal

#38

Post by bpshaver » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

This is neat. I recently wanted something similar so this is what I did:

1. Zellij split panes

2. Left pane: Helix editor with built-in Marksman (markdown LSP) support.

3. Right pane: watchexec (re- runs commands when watched files change) running Glow (Terminal markdown renderer) on the last modified markdown file (‘ls’ gives you that)

Then you can use ‘gd’ and whatnot to move between references from one markdown file to another.

This is easily composed of smaller parts, so you can use vim instead of helix, tmux instead of zellij, mdcat instead of glow.

It’s really the same process I might use to edit code on the left and re run tests or compiler checks or linting on the right. Since I was already doing those things, turning my terminal into a markdown viewer was trivial.