Seashell

Seashell is a small experimental terminal-based Markdown reader/personal wiki written in C using ncurses and MD4C. It is meant as a personal project to explore text rendering, parsing, and terminal interaction on Linux. Perhaps I evolve it into a sort of shell/envirnoment rendered from markdown files to execute lua scripts and explore rendering images in terminal emulators like kitty.

Features

• Parses Markdown using MD4C.

• Renders styled text in the terminal with ncurses:

  • Bold, italic, underline
  • Headers with colors
  • Inline code blocks
  • Links with highlighting

• Basic mouse support, clicking moves the cursor, clicking links enters them.

• Simple scrolling for larger documents, the app can scroll large folded lines.

• Internal representation (IR) of tokens to manage formatting.

• Wiki mode: Markdown links can point to other local files, allowing you to build a simple personal wiki.

Building

Seashell depends on:

• ncurses
• md4c (already included in the code for now)
• cmake (for building)

Then clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/Danielgb23/seashell.git
cd seashell
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

The executable will be available as Seashell inside the build directory.

Usage

Run Seashell by passing a Markdown file as an argument:

./seashell ../README.md

In the folder tests there are several test files. To link to another file you have to use a file:// prefix.

Controls

• Keyboard / mouse: scroll through the document.
• Links: hover over a link with the cursor to highlight it.
• Wiki navigation: pressing Enter on a link to another file or clicking it will open it (if the file exists locally).

Status

This is still a work-in-progress.

License

GNU 3.0 License. See LICENSE for details.