Getting started

mido reads Markdown in the terminal. Point it at a file and it renders the document with real headings, wrapped paragraphs, highlighted code and aligned tables. Point it at a folder and it becomes a documentation browser.

Install

mido is on crates.io. With a Rust toolchain of 1.93 or newer:

cargo install mido

To build the latest commit instead of the latest release:

cargo install --git https://github.com/anistark/mido

Or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/anistark/mido
cd mido
cargo install --path .

Either way the mido binary lands in ~/.cargo/bin, which is on your PATH if cargo is.

Open a file

mido README.md

The document fills the terminal. Scroll with j and k, the arrow keys or the mouse wheel. g and G jump to the top and the bottom. Press q to leave.

If the terminal is wide enough, an outline of the headings appears in a card at the top right. It follows your reading position as you scroll.

Open a folder

mido docs/
mido

With a folder, or no argument at all, mido lists the Markdown files in a sidebar on the left and opens README.md, then index.md, then the first file it finds. Relative links between files open in place and H takes you back. See Panels and Navigation.

Get help

Press ? or h at any time for the key overlay, grouped by task. t opens a table of contents you can jump from. The full list is on the Keys page.

This documentation ships inside the binary. mido docs opens it offline, in project mode, whenever there is no docs folder in the current directory.

Read from a pipe

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anistark/mido/main/README.md | mido -

A single - reads the document from stdin. To send rendered output somewhere else instead of opening the viewer, see print mode on the Command line page.

Colors

mido uses truecolor when the terminal advertises it through COLORTERM, and falls back to 256 colors otherwise. Setting NO_COLOR turns colors off and keeps the structure through bold, italic and rules.

It also asks the terminal whether its background is light or dark and picks mido-light or mido-dark to match. mido themes lists the other built-in themes, and --theme nord tries one. To keep a choice, put it in the config file, and see Themes to write your own.