Markdown Doctor

An absurdly simple script that renders your markdown to html.

Update: The latest and greatest version of this tool is markdownd. It contains many improvements, including the ability to watch for changes to your markdown files and automatically update them in a browser. It's also distributed as a binary and doesn't require Ruby.

Markdown Doctor uses pygments for syntax highlighting code blocks.

$ gem install markdown_doctor

Note: You'll also need Python installed on your system.

To output to stdout:

$ markdown_doctor <filename>

To read from stdin and output to stdout:

$ cat "this is a test" | markdown_doctor

To display in a browser:

$ gem install bcat
$ markdown_doctor.rb <filename> | bcat

Try putting this in your .vimrc:

" Quickly display a markdown preview of the current buffer
:map <leader>m :%w ! markdown_doctor \| bcat<CR><CR>