GemView

A simple viewer for local GemText files.

GemView is a little command-line tool for viewing and browsing local text files, mainly in the GemText markup language (see below).

Screenshot of an application showing colorful formatted text in a terminal.

Features:

Syntax highlighting for GemText, Markdown and org files.
Follow links to local files in GemText and directories.
Open external links in the system-default web browser.

Download

GemView is open source under the MIT license. See source code:

version 0.7 beta (9.5K)

For more information:

System requirements

GemView requires Python 3 and the Urwid library. Both are readily available in most Linux and BSD distributions, or else from the python.org website and the Python Package Index, respectively.

A terminal emulator that supports ANSI control codes is required.

Usage

gemview.py [ -h | -v | <file or directory> ]

Links can be clicked, but you need a keyboard to navigate. Shortcuts:

Press 'b' to go back.
Press 'r' or F5 to reload.
Press 'h' for the session history.
Press 'q' or F10 to exit.

GemView can also be imported as a Python module and used that way.

Status

As of 3 February 2023, GemView appears to work reliably, but needs more testing. To follow external links, a graphical desktop and browser are recommended.

To do:

❌ Show where a link goes without following it.
✅ Allow navigating up the directory tree.
✅ Show session history and allow jumping to entries.

More information

You can usually find me on IRC, in the #ctrl-c channel of tilde.chat, or else on Mastodon. Would love to hear from you.

More small things