One of the central tenets of my productivity workflow is that the fewer times I have to switch between app windows, the better. I’ve been replacing my desktop apps with Terminal-based ones, including being able to browse and watch YouTube from the command line, and it’s made my workflow more streamlined.

But one thing persisted — Obsidian — because I couldn’t find a Markdown-based editor for use in the Terminal. At least, that’s what I thought, but then I stumbled across Glow, and the last piece in my TUI-based workflow dropped into place. This wonderfully low-resource editor lives in whatever Terminal window I have open, and lets me edit and read with lightning speed, and I can’t go back to the old ways of external apps.

What is Glow, and why would you want to use it?

Edit Markdown files from your Terminal window without having to leave it

If you haven’t experienced the joys of using Markdown for your notes, it’s time to start. You might already be using it, though, as popular chat apps like Discord use a version of Markdown for the text input box. It’s a faster word processing tool that uses easy-to-remember symbols for adding formatting.

That’s true enough when you’re using a bloated Electron app, but it’s even more so when you’re in a Terminal Emulator, as nothing beats the speed of a TUI. Glow is incredibly fast, both at searching through your folders for Markdown files, opening them, and editing the results.

It’s open-source, cross-platform, and more importantly, doesn’t take up another precious spot on your taskbar, as it runs fully in the Terminal window. But it’s not just for Markdown, as it’ll open source code as well. Haskell? Fine, go ahead. Heck, dive into some LaTeX or Rust if the vibe takes you, and you’ll find it’s just as fast and stable as the Terminal window you’re using.

Glow works wherever you are

Chances are, the operating system you’re reading this on has a version of Glow to use. Unless you’re on iOS, but you might still be able to use Termux to install it. It’s in the brew package manager for macOS or Linux, or MacPorts, or Arch, Void, Nix shell, FreeBSD, Solus, Android, Ubuntu (via snap), Fedora/RHEL, and Windows (via Chocolatey, Scoop, or Winget).

I used Winget, and ran into a minor issue because I’m on Insider builds, and it wouldn’t run until I installed UniGetUI. I’m glad it’s working because I wouldn’t have known until the next time I tried to update things with Winget, and I’d much rather it was working.

Glow

It’s no secret I love working in the Terminal

Why waste productivity by switching between apps?

Text, more text, and no distractions. That’s why I love being able to work in the Terminal, and while I haven’t made the jump to a tiling windows manager like Hyprland (yet), I’m sure that will happen once I have a more permanent laptop to install it on.

I get distracted far too easily, one of the drawbacks of how my brain works that is balanced out by how quickly I can work once I’m laser-focused on a task. Using a TUI-based editor like Glow means I can only focus, and I don’t have menus, cognitive overload, or task switching to worry about to detract from the work at hand.

But Glow isn’t only a TUI editor for Markdown; it has a CLI for managing your files, wherever they might come from. For example, you can do the following:

# Read from fileglow README.md# Read from stdinecho "[Glow](https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow)" | glow -# Fetch README from GitHub / GitLabglow github.com/charmbracelet/glow# Fetch markdown from HTTPglow https://host.tld/file.md

That fetches the Markdown file from wherever I specified, and opens in the Terminal so that I can read, edit, and save a copy. It’s all handled without backing out of the CLI, or switching to a browser, or even opening a file manager to find the file in question.

And it doesn’t matter which Terminal emulator I’m using. PowerShell, Command Prompt, the Terminal in whichever Linux distribution I’m currently using, they’re all compatible with Glow, and just one word is enough to get the Markdown editor running and looking through my folders to sniff out every Markdown file I have saved.

Glow is the Markdown editor I didn’t know I needed

I absolutely love any app that lets me work in a TUI. It makes me more productive because I’m not hunting through layers of menus to find features I need; everything is a few keystrokes away. Plus, it helps that it makes me feel like a hacker, even if I’m terrible at actual coding. Sometimes, it’s the feeling of the thing that is important for my personal productivity, and Glow fits perfectly.