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Are there any pagers/readers/viewers for the use inside the Linux terminal that can follow links to the same page and different files (not necessarily on the net) which have an simpler markup language than texinfo (for info)?

Something similar to the Vim documentation but direct from the terminal. I was hoping to use markdown as the as it has become so popular but there are no simple terminal viewers (I have not tried any written in javascript and mpv does not support links). Org-mode seems ok but does not seem to be useful outside emacs.

All I need are internal links and hopefully some color coding and a simple syntax for the markup language that I can use to create new documents

Please Note: I am not looking for anything with its own GUI.

UPDATE: I also tried using pandoc to convert markdown to html and Texinfo (and odt), but it was a bit of a disappointment at least for what I am looking for as none of the links seemed to work which meant it quickly became complicated as I then had to edit everything again . I am hoping to write and use documents without conversion(but a pager that uses a language that is supported by pandoc would be great! )

UPDATE2: I am trying to avoid using Vim and Emacs because they are not very portable across machines and definitely not lightweight. It would seem the most portable lightweight renderer is info/pinfo. I am however curious to know if there was anything else out there.

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  • If you're happy with browsing Vim documentation in Vim, why don't you write that? Likewise with info: it's a bit akward to write directly, but nothing that a few editor macros can't fix. Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 21:13
  • @Gilles Any Idea where to get information on the direct language for info? I can't seem to find that, everything seems to lead to Texinfo. Yes vim (documentation) is probably the way I will go but I was curious if there was a simple pager that could do what I wanted Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 21:20

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Convert the markdown to HTML (e.g. with markdown) and use a terminal-based web browser such as w3m, links or lynx.

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  • Thanks but I tried that with pandoc and I could not follow the links. I forgot to put that in my question. I will update it to reflect that Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 20:56
  • @DiiP Links do work with HTML generated from Markdown with markdown or pandoc. I use that often. It does require a translation, I don't think any of the lightweight terminal web browsers can do conversion on the fly. Of course Emacs can, but at a guess you wouldn't like that. Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 21:12
  • what about man --html man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/man.1.html Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 21:57
  • @Giles Ok I finally got the links to work for other files by editing the generated html, but it would mean writing and editing every file twice. Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 21:57
  • @Giles Also I think emacs is a terrific (in all senses of the word) program but It is definitely not my goto editor if I was going to use it for this, I would probably just write org-mode directly. Commented Jul 18, 2018 at 22:04

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