Glow Markdown vs MacMD Viewer: Terminal or Native (2026)

Short version: Glow is the best Markdown reader I know of for a terminal, and it costs nothing. MacMD Viewer is for the other half of the day, when you are in Finder, the document has diagrams, or you need a PDF. If that is the gap you have, see MacMD Viewer pricing: $19.99 one-time, 14-day money-back, no subscription.

Every Glow and mdcat fact on this page was verified 9 October 2026 against their GitHub repositories, releases and the Homebrew formula.

What is Glow?#

Glow is a terminal-based Markdown reader made by Charm, the team behind Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss. Its README describes it as a reader "designed from the ground up to bring out the beauty — and power — of the CLI". It is MIT licensed, has around 27,600 stars on GitHub, and the current release is v3.0.0, published 11 August 2026. That release moved Glow to Bubble Tea v2 and, in Charm's words, has "no UX changes".

It works in two modes:

• The TUI. Run glow with no arguments and it lists the Markdown files in the current directory and below, or across the whole repository if you are inside a Git repo. Pick one and it opens in a pager that uses most of the keys you know from less; ? lists the rest.
• The CLI. glow README.md renders a file straight to the terminal. It also reads from stdin, fetches a README from a GitHub or GitLab repo (glow github.com/charmbracelet/glow) and renders Markdown from any HTTP URL.

Options cover what a terminal reader needs: -w sets the wrap width, -p sends output through your pager, and -s picks a style. By default Glow detects your terminal background and chooses dark or light; you can also pass another Glamour style or your own JSON stylesheet. A glow.yml config file stores your defaults.

Install it with brew install glow on a Mac. It is also on MacPorts, most Linux package managers, Scoop, Chocolatey and Winget, and the releases page has binaries for macOS, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Stash is gone. Older articles describe Glow's "stash", which synced documents to Charm's cloud. The v2.0.0 release notes (23 August 2024) say plainly: "the stash feature has been removed." Glow today is a local reader.

Where Glow wins#

I use a terminal all day, so I am not going to pretend a Mac app beats Glow at its own game:

• SSH and servers. On a remote box, Glow is the right tool and MacMD Viewer is not an option at all.
• No context switch. You are already in the shell; glow is fewer keystrokes than opening any app.
• Remote READMEs. Pointing it at a GitHub repo and reading the README in place is great.
• Cross-platform and free. Same tool on Linux, Windows and your Mac, at no cost, with the source on GitHub.

Where a Mac reading window wins#

A terminal draws text in a grid of character cells. That is Glow's strength and also its ceiling, and two open feature requests show where it stops:

• Mermaid diagrams. Glow does not render them; a fenced mermaid block shows as code. The request, issue #342, has been open since May 2022. MacMD Viewer renders Mermaid diagrams with Mermaid 11.13.0, including inside Finder previews.
• Images. Glow does not show them inline. Issue #211, "Display images in terminal", has been open since November 2020. MacMD Viewer renders local images in the page.
• Finder. Glow has no Quick Look extension. With MacMD Viewer, you select a .md file in Finder and press Space to see it rendered, without opening anything. Details on the Quick Look page.
• Reload on save. Glow refreshes the list and the document when you press r. MacMD Viewer reloads by itself when your editor or a coding agent saves the file, which matters when you keep the rendered view next to the editor.
• PDF. Glow has no export. MacMD Viewer exports a PDF (⇧⌘P) that keeps Mermaid diagrams and highlighted code.
• Reading comfort. Proportional fonts, real tables and 12 document themes, independent of whatever font and colours your terminal uses.

That is the trade, and $19.99 is what I charge for it. If none of those points matter to you, Glow is enough.

Use both#

This is the setup I would actually recommend to a developer on a Mac: keep brew install glow for the shell and SSH, and set MacMD Viewer as the default app for .md in Finder. Glow when your hands are on the keyboard in a terminal; MacMD Viewer when you double-click a file, preview it with Space, or the document has a diagram in it. Neither tool edits, so both sit next to the editor you already use. If you are still choosing how to open Markdown at all, I keep a guide to the other ways to open a .md file on a Mac.

Glow vs mdcat#

mdcat is the other terminal reader people compare Glow with. It is a "fancy cat for Markdown" written in Rust: it renders CommonMark straight to the terminal, highlights code blocks with syntect, and shows images inline in terminals that support it (iTerm2, kitty, WezTerm, Ghostty, VS Code's terminal and Terminology). Invoked as mdless, it pages its output.

The catch is maintenance. The original repository, swsnr/mdcat, is archived and its README says it "is no longer maintained"; its last release there was 2.7.1, in December 2024. The README points to a maintained fork, BIRSAx2/mdcat, whose latest release is 2.18.0 (1 October 2026). It is licensed MPL-2.0.

How they differ in practice:

• Glow is a full TUI: file browser, pager, styles, remote READMEs. No images.
• mdcat is a one-shot renderer, closer to cat. It draws images in capable terminals, but has no file browser, and you should install the fork rather than the archived original.

Neither renders Mermaid. If you want diagrams, you need something that draws them, in a browser or in a Mac app.

Who should choose which?#

Choose Glow if you read Markdown mostly in a terminal, work over SSH, use Linux or Windows too, or want a free tool. Choose mdcat (the maintained fork) if you want images inline in iTerm2, kitty or WezTerm and do not need a browser.

Choose MacMD Viewer if you open Markdown from Finder, want Space-bar previews, read documents with Mermaid diagrams or images, export to PDF, or keep a rendered view next to your editor that updates on save. It runs on macOS 14 or later. For the wider field of Mac apps, see my best Markdown viewers for Mac roundup, or start from the MacMD Viewer homepage.

Methodology#

I build and sell MacMD Viewer, so weigh this page accordingly. How it was put together, on 9 October 2026:

• Glow: the GitHub API and README for charmbracelet/glow (licence, stars, archive status), the release notes for v3.0.0 and v2.0.0 (stash removal, r to refresh, editor hand-off), issues #342 and #211 (both open), and the Homebrew glow formula (3.0.0, active).
• mdcat: the GitHub API and README for swsnr/mdcat (archived, MPL-2.0, last release 2.7.1) and the releases of the BIRSAx2/mdcat fork.
• MacMD Viewer: the app's own build and the site's product facts.
• I did not benchmark either terminal tool. Anything I could not verify at its source was left out, which is why this page makes no claim about Glow's syntax highlighting.

The Bottom Line#

Glow is free, actively maintained and excellent in a terminal; keep it. What it cannot do is draw a Mermaid diagram, show an image, preview a file in Finder or export a PDF. If you want those on your Mac, MacMD Viewer is $19.99 once: see pricing.