Mdview and the missing middle between less and Electron
Mdview is a fast Markdown viewer designed for the Wayland desktop, aiming to provide a quick way to read Markdown files without disrupting workflow. It sits between lightweight tools like less and heavier Electron-based viewers, offering structured text rendering without the overhead of a full application. The project utilizes direct communication with Wayland and a simple architecture to efficiently render Markdown content.
- ▪Mdview is intended for quick viewing of Markdown files in a terminal environment.
- ▪It uses a direct approach to interact with Wayland, avoiding larger GUI toolkits.
- ▪The application is lightweight, with a stripped binary size of 2.6 MB.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Leon Becker's Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.leonbecker.de/mdview-and-the-missing-middle-between-less-and-electron/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 21:47:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T22:02:03.028Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T22:02:03.028Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Urk0rVou43Ye |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I wrote mdview because I wanted a fast Markdown viewer for the Wayland desktop. Just a quick way to open a README or a design note without breaking flow. Developers spend a lot of time around Markdown files: READMEs, runbooks, changelogs, design notes, random NOTES.md files in project directories. Most of the time I am already in a terminal when I want to read one. The usual options all work, but none of them feel quite right. less and vim are fast, but they show raw text. That works, but I usually need longer to understand what I am looking at. Markdown is often written to be read as structured text. Headings, tables, links, anchors, images, and highlighted code blocks make it easier to work with.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Leon Becker's Blog.
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