I’m in the terminal, reading some documentation, and I come across a Mermaid diagram. I want to quickly understand the flow, but instead I’m staring at a bunch of arrows, brackets, and text. The table below it stretches beyond the edge of the screen, and the image is just a filename.
This happens quite a bit. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and most of my Markdown files aren’t just text anymore. They have diagrams, tables, images, and other things that don’t translate particularly well to cat or less.
Sure, I could open a browser or an editor with Markdown preview, but sometimes I just want to stay in the terminal and read the document.
I looked at a few existing Markdown viewers, but none did quite what I wanted. So I built MDV (Markdown Viewer).
It’s written in Go and renders Markdown directly in the terminal, including properly formatted tables, images, and Mermaid diagrams. It also has the usual conveniences you’d expect from a document viewer, like search and navigation.
Why build another Markdown viewer?
A few years ago, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It’s a relatively small annoyance, and spending a weekend building a tool just for that might not have seemed worthwhile.
But things have changed.
Working with LunaRoute means I have access to practically unlimited tokens. I used DeepSeek 4.1 Flash to build MDV, and I could keep experimenting, fixing things, and adding features without thinking about how many tokens each iteration consumed.
That’s something I’ve found increasingly interesting about AI-assisted development. It changes which problems are worth solving. Things that were previously too small or too specific to justify the effort suddenly become reasonable projects.
I recently wrote about the original open-source dream and how AI makes it easier for people to build or modify software to fit their needs.
MDV is a small example of that. I had a problem, couldn’t find something that solved it the way I wanted, so I built it and made it open source.
I suspect we’ll see a lot more of these small, useful tools that exist simply because someone wanted them.
Anyway, if you work with Markdown in the terminal, give it a try:
GitHub: https://github.com/erans/mdv
go install github.com/erans/mdv@latest
mdv README.md
There are also prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Sometimes you just want to scratch your own itch. Now it’s much easier to do so.