Play

Go
binary

README

local
source

README.md

README.txt

main
repo

README

remote
repository

README.md

cmd
subrepo

README.txt

Step 4: Render Markdown as colored ANSI text

Markdown renderers usually produce HTML, in some cases PDF, and, if they value traditional typesetting, also LaTeX. Plain text with ANSI color codes is far less widespread.

Again, luck was on my side. This fork of blackfriday implements an ANSI renderer for Markdown. So getting color-coded ANSI output from a README file required little more than copying a couple of lines from mdcat that uses the ANSI renderer under the hood.

Done.

Get goman

Get goman via go get:

go get -u github.com/christophberger/goman

Usage

It’s all in the README, so simply type goman goman ;-)

TL;DR:

goman <binary>  # find and display the README of <binary>

goman <binary> | less -R  # same but with paging

And a shell script can make goman blend in with the standard man command, to auto-reveal the README if the binary has no man page. (See the README for instructions.)

Happy coding!