Glamour — Stylesheet-Based Markdown Rendering for CLI Apps

Introduction

Glamour is a Go library by Charmbracelet that renders Markdown documents as styled ANSI terminal output. It provides a stylesheet system for controlling colors, indentation, and formatting, making it easy to display rich text content in CLI applications without building custom rendering logic.

What Glamour Does

• Converts Markdown to beautifully formatted ANSI terminal output
• Applies configurable stylesheets for dark, light, and custom themes
• Handles headings, code blocks, tables, lists, and links with color coding
• Wraps text to fit terminal width automatically
• Supports GitHub-Flavored Markdown including task lists and strikethrough

Architecture Overview

Glamour parses Markdown using the goldmark parser and then applies a style tree to produce ANSI-escaped output. Each Markdown element type (heading, paragraph, code block) maps to a style definition that controls foreground/background colors, margins, padding, and text decoration. The library outputs plain strings with embedded ANSI codes, compatible with any terminal emulator.

Self-Hosting & Configuration

• Add Glamour to your Go project with go get github.com/charmbracelet/glamour
• Use the glamour.Render() function for quick single-call rendering
• Create a custom glamour.TermRenderer with a specific style for reuse
• Choose from built-in styles: DarkStyle, LightStyle, AutoStyle, or NoTTYStyle
• Define custom JSON stylesheets to match your application's branding

Key Features

• Zero external dependencies beyond the Go standard library and goldmark
• Word wrapping that respects terminal width and avoids mid-word breaks
• Syntax highlighting for fenced code blocks via the chroma library
• Emoji rendering with Unicode support in code and prose
• Integration with other Charm tools like Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss

Comparison with Similar Tools

• Rich (Python) — similar terminal rendering but Python-only, not a Go library
• termimad (Rust) — Markdown rendering for Rust terminals, smaller feature set
• mdcat — standalone CLI for rendering Markdown, not an embeddable library
• Glow (Charm) — CLI Markdown viewer built on Glamour for end-user use
• ANSI Markdown — various language-specific solutions without stylesheet support

FAQ

Q: Can I use Glamour in a Bubble Tea TUI application? A: Yes. Glamour output is plain ANSI text that integrates naturally with Bubble Tea views.

Q: Does Glamour support HTML inside Markdown? A: HTML tags are stripped by default. Glamour focuses on standard Markdown elements for terminal rendering.

Q: How do I handle long documents? A: Set a max width on the renderer and pipe output through a pager like less -R for scrollable viewing.

Q: Is there a way to disable colors? A: Use the NoTTYStyle or set GLAMOUR_STYLE=notty to produce plain uncolored output for piping.

Sources

• https://github.com/charmbracelet/glamour
• https://charm.sh