Beautiful Markdown rendering in your terminal
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Hey HN, I’ve been cobbling together a tool to read beautifully formatted markdown without leaving my terminal.Lime renders markdown in the terminal with actual formatting - big headers, syntax highlighted code, mermaid diagrams, all drawn using Ghostty’s Kitty graphics protocol support.It picks up your terminal’s native theme and you can jump between headings, pull up a table of contents to search and jump to sections of your document.It’s macOS and Ghostty for now, the document lives in scroll back and we use Apple Events to ask Ghostty jump around the scroll back instead of re-rendering. This also lets you use Ghostty’s native search and shortcuts for navigation.
HN · launched Sep 11, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 56%) · 4 views
Niche: markdown editors and viewers · 158 launches, 13 in the last 7 days ▲ +86% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 158 launches in markdown editors and viewers →
Could you build this?
Partial Terminal markdown rendering and CLI scaffolding are vibe-codeable, but integrating the Kitty graphics protocol for rendering rasterized Mermaid diagrams inside a terminal emulator requires non-trivial low-level terminal I/O handling.
What it would actually take: A terminal application (typically written in Go, Rust, or Python) parsing Markdown via CommonMark/comrak and using a terminal library like Bubbletea or Ratatui. The difficult component is the headless rasterization of Mermaid.js diagrams to image buffers and encoding them into the Kitty Graphics Protocol escape sequences with terminal cell coordinate alignment. It requires solid understanding of terminal escape protocols, virtual terminal emulators, and headless rendering pipelines.
Discussion
3 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: lynx, chawan, glow
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 357 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #187 of 358 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 291 days after the earliest competitor.
- lime · github · 2026-09-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- omanote · ph · 2026-09-29 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- showmd · ph · 2026-04-13 · 202 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Markpad · hn · 2026-01-28 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Coluracetam · ph · 2026-10-07 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Beauty - Beautiful markdown notes · ph · 2026-10-03 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Executable Markdown files with Unix pipes · hn · 2026-01-09 · 126 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- A TUI for Markdown view an editing · hn · 2026-04-28 · 20 upvotes · similarity 0.49
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