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A native markdown viewer that launches from the terminal. Rust + Svelte 5.

9 starsRust

Attn – Markdown viewer and editor in a <20MB binary (Rust)

by lightsofapollo·Mar 5, 2026·2 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerNiche GemSlickShip It

Live-reloading markdown editor from the terminal, no Electron bloat.

Strengths
  • •Ships as <20MB npm binary (Rust), zero cargo/homebrew required—lowest friction distribution for CLI tools.
  • •Live reload + interactive checkboxes + full ProseMirror editor solve real Claude Code workflow friction.
  • •Mermaid/math/media rendering inline with file-tree fuzzy search makes it competitive with VS Code preview for focused reading.
Weaknesses
  • •macOS-only (no Linux/Windows support stated), limiting audience to a subset of terminal developers.
  • •Single-instance daemon model with tab UI is clever but untested at scale—unclear if it handles 50+ markdown files smoothly.
Target Audience

Terminal-first developers, Claude Code users, engineers reading/annotating markdown plans

Similar To

VisiData (terminal TUI paradigm) · Obsidian (markdown editor with live preview) · Markdown Preview in VS Code

Post Description

I use Claude Code as my primary dev environment. It generates a lot of markdown. Planning docs, architecture notes, task lists. I wanted something purpose-built for reading markdown. Not a browser tab, not a preview pane in an editor. A real app I can launch from the terminal.

VS Code's markdown preview is fine but I don't really use VS Code. I wanted something Claude Code could launch for me and get a nice readable window.

So I built attn. One command, OS webview window, under 20MB. No Electron, no bundled Chromium.

Some things that ended up being useful:

npx attnmd README.md and it just works. Rust binary distributed through npm so you don't need cargo or a homebrew tap.

Live reload. I'm reading a plan while the agent is still writing it. Save the file, see it update.

Full ProseMirror editor with syntax highlighting, math, and mermaid. I annotate plans inline without opening another tool.

Mermaid diagrams render inline. Agents love generating mermaid.

Stack: Rust (wry/tao wrapping the OS webview — WebKit on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux), Svelte 5 + ProseMirror frontend compiled by Vite and embedded into the binary at build time.

npx attnmd README.md to try it, cargo install attn to build from source. MIT licensed, source at github.com/lightsofapollo/attn.

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