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+---
+layout: post
+title: Markdown Support
+excerpt: A side effect of fancier help text
+---
+
+*(This change will be in the upcoming v0.11.0 release)*
+
+As part of the effort to polish the lnav TUI, I wanted to make the builtin
+help text look a bit nicer. The current help text is a plain text file with
+some ANSI escape sequences for colors. It's not easy to write or read. Since
+Markdown has become a dominant way to write this type of document, I figured
+I could use that and have the side benefit of allowing lnav to read Markdown
+docs. Fortunately, the [MD4C](https://github.com/mity/md4c) library exists.
+This library provides a nice event-driven parser for documents instead of
+just converting directly to HTML. In addition, document structure is now
+shown/navigable through the new breadcrumb bar at the top. I think the
+result is pretty nice:
+
+<script id="asciicast-2hx3UiyzOHQXBQOBf31ztKvHc"
+ src="https://asciinema.org/a/2hx3UiyzOHQXBQOBf31ztKvHc.js"
+ async>
+</script>
+
+## Viewing Markdown Files
+
+Files with an `.md` suffix will be considered as Markdown and will be
+parsed as such. As an example, here is lnav displaying its README.md file:
+
+<script id="asciicast-iw4rwddZNGCe3v8DyOfItERG9"
+ src="https://asciinema.org/a/iw4rwddZNGCe3v8DyOfItERG9.js"
+ async>
+</script>