Show HN: Frogmouth – A Markdown browser for the terminal (github.com)

I did add some vim-friendly bindings for switching the navigation panes on the left, but thinking about it not for the main viewer. Feels like an oversight now, good call. I’ll add that to the todo list.

Speed, consistency, customization.

> 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)

Unix is an IDE. CLI (and GUI) tools are the plugins.

Reasons vary by tool, but some include: Speed, composability (see the "Rule of Composition" from the Unix philosophy), and the ability to be run in a remote terminal

For me, it's focus.

- most programmers in general are really fast with keyboard , like maybe 80-90 avg most of them so using the keyboard most is a good way for speed & consistency - another example i can give is maybe you have some error on your ide that you can't debug for some reasons, most probably you can't copy text from that window, (it's just an example maybe you'll similar issue in other ways) having cli means you can copy whatever the program is throwing at your, theres not limit - another thing is aesthetic: you know you can do a lot.of stuff from cli, all will have the same color scheme & consistency across every cli programmes which someone may prefer. - lightweight

IDEs are often big, slow, costly, inconsistently featureful, subject to the vagaries of personal taste and fluctuating support, difficult or impossible to automate, and not always available (either not installed, not possible to install, or just expecting a graphical interface that is not local to the operator)

TUIs/CLI programs are (generally) small, composable, consistent, reliable, fast, well-supported, installed by default or easily obtained, predictable, have good keyboard shortcuts, and they work great remotely.

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 a text editor gets out of their way initially to get started developing. In the long-run, though, it’s worse for cognitive overhead because you have to keep more state in your head due to having worse code completion. You also have the additional effort needed to set up plugins with text-based tools to provide additional features that are helpful for daily tasks.

2. IDEs tend to have more knobs - big menus, dropdowns etc. Those can reduce your ability to focus when you’re not used to them. Many of the available options likely aren’t applicable to what you’re working on, and can be distracting.

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.

4. Programmers love to yak-shave. Using more primitive tools gives a reason for us to customize the experience, even or especially if it’s an inefficient waste of time. Programmers love opportunities for self-expression through code and customizing the experience of using their coding environments for its own sake.

You get an endlessly customizable setup with a single interface. Build, write, read docs, test, lint, debug, troubleshoot, admin. Same interface. All keyboard driven, so I don't have to switch between keys and mouse.

It's extremely portable, works exactly the same on my machine as it does on any OS with bash and vim, it's easy to use on a remote machine.

It's easily scriptable as well which makes customization simple. It's way faster for me to write a quick script to do something I need then dig through an endless list of marginally verified plugins to do something.

I guess my question is what can you do with an IDE that can't be done at the CLI?

I've tried code, pycharm, eclipse and really never found a value add.

And all of that applies to other tasks beyond coding. Notes, email, chat, it's right there, hey what's the price of that stock my buddy was talking about? Yep, right there. Hey look also my music.

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.

VSCode is my main tool from day to day - I use it extensively for coding, documenting, writing papers, drafting e-mails, writing my work log/diary. However I was intrigued by this tool as I've already have open 4-6 tabs in my VSCode, so I think this would be neat to reduce the resource use a bit.

I feel like you shouldn't be downvoted, it seemed like a genuine question with no snark.

To me, it's the flexibility, composability, automation, etc, like may have said in the thread.

I use Vim because:

- works at the speed I think. It renders text quickly, responds to my keystrokes quickly, and lets me work my will quickly. That's nice when I have a lot to do or am inspired, which covers most of the time I'm coding

- It's open source and trustworthy. I'm not gonna wake up one day and find out a critical plugin I use is closing the source and making a change I hate, or that Vim itself was uploading my code to copilot, etc.

- It's basically a platform. You can do whatever you want in Vim, remap all the keybindings, make a music player, whatever.

- It's respectful of my computer's resources. It starts up almost instantly, and generally uses very little CPU and RAM.

Yup. Glow looks pretty cool.

Wow, glow looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

Since we're talking alternatives:

- https://github.com/swsnr/mdcat

- https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

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"

You can browse the web with lynx or w3m, and (kind of) watch videos with yewtube.

You mean like with brow.sh?

this. I would love to have a cli-based barebones obsidian vault browser

Baca might interest you: https://github.com/wustho/baca

The closest thing in Go I know of is bubbletea:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Markdown can also contain inlined HTML, which is not human readable.

Just because something is human readable doesn't mean there isn't value in making it even more readable? I would certainly prefer to read a markdown file rendered like this than completely raw.

It also renders headers, horizontal rule, bold, emphasis, strike through, underline, links, inline code, block quotes, and tables.

There's a few terminal browsers like w3m, browsh and links that should work for many basic HTML pages.

    Elinks -dump google.com

I've found elinks to be really good. It preserves colors and has really nice navigation controls for interactive use (you can press dot to toggle numbered links). Here is a screenshot of this page: https://i.imgur.com/mP1T0H3.png

If you're just looking to format a page, it has a -dump option. If you want to preserve colors as well, use -dump-color-mode 4

It supports normal Markdown links right now. As an Obsidian user I have been thinking wikilinks would be nice to add too. No firm plans but something I’d like to add.