Markdown Preview

[txtyash]

Markdown preview similar to this plugin:
https://github.com/davidgranstrom/nvim-markdown-preview

[CptPotato]

An in-terminal preview using the builtin markdown view would be a nice option, too.

[txtyash]

An in-terminal preview using the builtin markdown view would be a nice option, too.

I don't think so. I've used similar with neovim and it's terrible. It has all wrong colors and no way to view images.

But I wouldn't say no to both types of previews.

[felix-u]

Subjectively, this sounds more like a plugin than a core feature.

[txtyash]

@felix-u Ya, a plugin would suit better.

[Jedsek]

This should be a plugin

[aikomastboom]

I found this: https://pypi.org/project/markdown-server/

might be helpful

[MDeiml]

Markdown preview could actually (efficiently) be handled by a language server. There is already https://github.com/euclio/mdpls which does exactly that.

[MDeiml]

Actually installing that and adding

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-server = { command = "/path/to/mdpls" }
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true, markdown.preview.browser = "firefox" }

to your language.toml already gives you a markdown preview. The repo I linked seems to be missing a few core features though, e.g. images don't work and I would love some auto-scrolling.

[TheCaptainCraken]

@MDeiml I tried that but it looks like it does not support the $\neq$ :(

[MDeiml]

Not sure if latex is supported for that repo, seems like it uses https://github.com/euclio/aurelius under the hood which might support latex? I'm not sure.

You could open an issue in that repo and ask the author.

[TheCaptainCraken]

Yep I looked into that and it should support latex. I checked and it supports all other symbols like $\sqrt x$ $\gt$ etc.
It actually prints the $\ne$ butit renders it like \ = wich is odd. I'll open an issue there.

[0xlilith]

Actually installing that and adding

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-server = { command = "/path/to/mdpls" }
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true, markdown.preview.browser = "firefox" }

to your language.toml already gives you a markdown preview. The repo I linked seems to be missing a few core features though, e.g. images don't work and I would love some auto-scrolling.

how do I open the preview?

[thorstenweber83]

@0xlilith
:lsp-workspace-command Open\ Preview should do the trick!
If it does not open, mdpls probably can not find the browser you specified inside your path.

[MDeiml]

The preview should also open automatically if you open a markdown file. It works for me at least.

[sgon00]

Hopefully, helix will have better markdown preview or highlight support in the future. So far, I am using vscode for markdown editing.

[jkoshiel]

Actually installing that and adding

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-server = { command = "/path/to/mdpls" }
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true, markdown.preview.browser = "firefox" }

to your language.toml already gives you a markdown preview. The repo I linked seems to be missing a few core features though, e.g. images don't work and I would love some auto-scrolling.

Is there a way to control the presentation theme in the Firefox preview? e.g. not white text on black background. Don't think I want to manage the css directly in the markdown files as that would impact it's presentation everywhere

[MDeiml]

Doesn't seem like it, but it doesn't seem to hard to implement yourself. Maybe create an issue or pull request in https://github.com/euclio/mdpls? Or you could just fork that repo and edit the template to your liking.

[David-Else]

I am using gh extension install yusukebe/gh-markdown-preview, it is great and has live reload, but no mirroring the line position in Helix and the browser. Can anything do that in Helix? Does mdpls do anything extra?

[arcstur]

Actually installing that and adding

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-server = { command = "/path/to/mdpls" }
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true, markdown.preview.browser = "firefox" }

to your language.toml already gives you a markdown preview. The repo I linked seems to be missing a few core features though, e.g. images don't work and I would love some auto-scrolling.

This is awesome, thank you very much. This, however, disables marksman, which has cool features (creating Table of Contents, [[wiki lins]], [[#heading links]], etc). So I instead use this:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-servers = ["marksman", "mdpls"]

[language-server.mdpls]
command = "/home/arcstur/.cargo/bin/mdpls"
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true }

Open Preview doesn't appear in the workspace commands, but it always open a new preview when opening a markdown file. I don't know how to merge both workspace commands of the two LSPs.

[rahulTPatil]

Actually installing that and adding

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-server = { command = "/path/to/mdpls" }
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true, markdown.preview.browser = "firefox" }

to your language.toml already gives you a markdown preview. The repo I linked seems to be missing a few core features though, e.g. images don't work and I would love some auto-scrolling.

This is awesome, thank you very much. This, however, disables marksman, which has cool features (creating Table of Contents, [[wiki lins]], [[#heading links]], etc). So I instead use this:

[[language]]
name = "markdown"
language-servers = ["marksman", "mdpls"]

[language-server.mdpls]
command = "/home/arcstur/.cargo/bin/mdpls"
config = { markdown.preview.auto = true }

Open Preview doesn't appear in the workspace commands, but it always open a new preview when opening a markdown file. I don't know how to merge both workspace commands of the two LSPs.

I was able to get goto-defnition and Open Preview working (as I had different notes linked) with these 2 working, just have to switch the order of LSPs
language-servers = ["mdpls", "marksman"]

[superiums]

modern browser is so weight for preview task.
maybe something light more suit for this.
i'll tried dillo , but not work.

vimb, midori works.
any more good one?

[arcstur]

I think that choosing a good theme makes a lot of difference. I saw that only a few themes have different colors for heading levels. Kanagawa, sonokai and papercolor have, for example. Only a few themes use colors for italic and bold, monokai being one of them. I think that using that, markdown already looks a lot better.

The only theme I found that had different colors both for h1/h2 and for bold/italic is onelight. I wonder if we can modify other themes to also differentiate colors on bold/italic/h1/h2. Doing that I think will make the markdown experience much better.

Markdown is made such that seeing it as code already makes it good, so I don't think we need different sizes for headings for example.

The only thing I would miss is having image previews. If someone that understands the codebase could guide me into where to start developing this, I would like it very much. I know it would be a plugin and we still need a plugin system haha.

[arcstur]

Looking at the code in /runtime/themes/ we can see that some themes define what I mentioned.

Kanagawa using colors for heading levels:

"markup.heading.marker" = "springViolet2"
"markup.heading.1" = { fg = "surimiOrange", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.heading.2" = { fg = "carpYellow", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.heading.3" = { fg = "waveAqua2", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.heading.4" = { fg = "lightBlue", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.heading.5" = { fg = "oniViolet", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.heading.6" = { fg = "springViolet1", modifiers = ["bold"] }

Monokai using colors for bold and italic

"markup.bold" = { fg = "yellow", modifiers = ["bold"] }
"markup.italic" = { fg = "magenta", modifiers = ["italic"] }

In my personal opinion, having colors for both heading levels and bold + italic make reading markdown much easier.

I wonder if we also can do that for other themes, or that is defined by the theme authors and we would violate their intetions. What are the maintainer thoughts on this?

[mzabani]

I wrote a bash script that previews anything pandoc can render in the terminal itself, and detects modifications to the file to reload. My helix-config-foo isn't great so I'm not sure if this can be integrated well; I'm currently using it in a separate terminal tab/window.
I hope this is useful to someone! It requires inotify-tools, termpdf.py or some other in-terminal PDF reader (do change the code if you're using something else) and pandoc.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -eo pipefail

FILE="$(realpath "$1")"
TMPDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
PDF="$TMPDIR/rendered.pdf"
trap "pkill -P $$ && rm -rf \"$TMPDIR\"" exit

regen() {
	inotifywait -q -e modify "$FILE" "$TMPDIR/closing.signal" > "$TMPDIR/inotify.log"
	grep -q "$TMPDIR/closing.signal" "$TMPDIR/inotify.log" || {
		pandoc "$FILE" -o "$PDF"
		pkill -P "$$" # Kills children of these script, which can only be termpdf.py at this point
	}
}

pushd "$TMPDIR" >/dev/null # termpdf.py's log file will go here and will be deleted on exit
pandoc "$FILE" -o "$PDF"
touch closing.signal

while :
do
	regen &
	termpdf.py "$PDF" && popd>/dev/null && echo 1 >"$TMPDIR/closing.signal" && exit 0 # If the user quits the viewer, we can exit nicely
done

[TheXnlyGhxst]

I'm not sure how to do it, but this seems like a fairly simple solution if it could be built into Helix, may also be able to simply use it as a language server in languages.toml: https://github.com/jannis-baum/vivify

Editor Support
Vivify has a simple API to integrate your favorite editor so the viewer live updates to any changes as you are typing and the scrolling is smoothly synchronized!
See below for a list of existing editor plugins. In case your favorite editor is not yet supported, use these as an example to write your own and add it to the list!

[pascalkuthe]

Vivify has a simple API to integrate your favorite editor

... if your "favorite editor" is written in javascript. This is something that can be covered by an LSP but it does not fit into core.

[TheXnlyGhxst]

Good point, it would need to be entirely rewritten in that case.

[TheXnlyGhxst]

For anyone still looking for a good solution to this, I've found that Glow works pretty well, if you don't mind a non rust program. Now I just want to figure out how to add a custom command into helix so I can launch it within the editor.

Edit: Discovered Inlyne after typing this: made with rust, actively maintained, does HTML viewing, and updates live. Has less features than Glow but I think this will be my solution for now.

[adriangalilea]

Now I just want to figure out how to add a custom command into helix so I can launch it within the editor.

You can use Zellij or TMUX and have a shortcut that opens up a popup/side-panel with the content, or as you mention later, you can have a program in another window that autoupdates. But again, I think Zellij would be best.

You can take a look at a yazi file-picker example in this discussion all my dotfiles are public so you can take a look at them and get an idea. I've successfully implemented it to open up lazygit, taskwarrior-tui, yazi and elia as a floating window through a helix shortcut.

In fact there's a "hack" that let's you open something like lazygit inside a helix buffer, but I'm not sure I can recommend that.
C-g = [":new", ":insert-output lazygit", ":buffer-close!", ":redraw"]

lazygit was the only program that I was able to open like that, but maybe you can try glow or inlyne too.

[FelixSchausberger]

@Gh0stGames did you ever figure out how to add a shortcut for glow? I can get a preview using the built in shell (like :sh glow "$0") but I'm unable to use it with a shortcut.

[andreacfromtheapp]

thank you @TheXnlyGhxst for Inlyne! It is amazing :)

[andar1an]

Ive been hsing mdpls, excited try inlyne too!

[andar1an]

Does anyone know if it is possible to reference current file in language server configuration command?

I have tried using ' inlyne view %buffer_name' but get an error about non-canonicalized path.

With mdpls there is an auto preview config option, trying to get similar functionality.

[David-Else]

I have some different solutions to preview Markdown in the browser: https://helix-editor-tutorials.com/tutorials/writing-documentation-and-prose-in-markdown-using-helix/#markdown-preview-in-the-browser

[nik-rev]

Helix already includes a markdown renderer, but it is an internal component that is used for rendering LSP documentation in hover menus

One could potentially re-use it when creating this feature

[taqtiqa-mark]

It appears that mpls is the maintained successor to mdpls,,,, https://github.com/mhersson/mpls

[andreacfromtheapp]

this is also amazing! (if one likes the browser better). I'm keeping both inlyne and mpls options.

[eureka-cpu]

Helix already includes a markdown renderer, but it is an internal component that is used for rendering LSP documentation in hover menus

One could potentially re-use it when creating this feature

I messed around with this. I think the hard part is that things are done very rigidly in terms of when and how things get rendered. I have a branch where there is some extra command line options so you can do :vsplit-preview and it will keep you in the same node instead of switching to the new one. When I looked around for options in terms of rendering, there is render_document and render_text, but these functions don't take into account that you may want to have special case rendering. I'm still working on it, perhaps after staring at it long enough I'll come up with an idea of how to get un-editable text to render while still being able to focus the node, in a way that is reasonable.

In the mean time, I came up with a small solution, which just always renders markdown files on hover if the lsp does not have that capability so that it doesn't interfere with lsp's that do, like https://github.com/matkrin/md-lsp.

diff --git a/helix-term/src/commands/lsp.rs b/helix-term/src/commands/lsp.rs
index 0494db3e..a7a60aae 100644
--- a/helix-term/src/commands/lsp.rs
+++ b/helix-term/src/commands/lsp.rs
@@ -1042,6 +1042,33 @@ pub fn hover(cx: &mut Context) {
         .count()
         == 0
     {
+        // Always render markdown on hover if markdown language server does not have hover capabilities.
+        if doc.language_name().is_some_and(|lang| lang == "markdown") {
+            cx.jobs.callback({
+                let content = doc.text().to_string();
+                async move {
+                    let hovers = vec![(
+                        "helix-markdown-hover".into(),
+                        lsp::Hover {
+                            contents: lsp::HoverContents::Markup(lsp::MarkupContent {
+                                kind: lsp::MarkupKind::Markdown,
+                                value: content,
+                            }),
+                            range: None,
+                        },
+                    )];
+
+                    let call = move |editor: &mut Editor, compositor: &mut Compositor| {
+                        let contents = Hover::new(hovers, editor.syn_loader.clone());
+                        let popup = Popup::new(Hover::ID, contents).auto_close(true);
+                        compositor.replace_or_push(Hover::ID, popup);
+                    };
+                    Ok(Callback::EditorCompositor(Box::new(call)))
+                }
+            });
+            return;
+        }
+
         cx.editor
             .set_error("No configured language server supports hover");
         return;

Maybe this will help anyone else who is wanting to try it. Another thought I had is, instead of preview hover, or preview split, it may be nice to just have a markdown-render command that just renders the markdown on the page temporarily until something resets it, similarly to hover. This would be much easier than a split preview, since it would be very close to what the diff I posted above does. One could potentially create a new UI element called Preview instead of Hover and then essentially do this.

[eureka-cpu]

One other issue with the word preview though, is that it implies what most people would expect from a previewer, which would include things like image loading. I'm not sure if the project would be okay with adding something like that, though there's ample projects which can be used as reference for image rendering. As a fallback, it could just not render images lol.