previewing-markdown-with-glance | glance

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previewing-markdown-with-glance | glance

Previewing markdown with glance

glance is the user's markdown viewer. When markdown is worth looking at, proactively offer to show it with glance instead of leaving raw text.

When to offer

You just wrote or substantially edited a .md file (a README, a doc, a spec, notes). Offer a preview once it's saved.
The user asks to read / see / preview / "show me" a markdown document.
Skip it for trivial edits (a typo, one line) — use judgment, don't nag.

Two ways to show it

glance has two sinks; pick by what the user needs:

Inline preview (default offer) — render it right in the session, framed so it's obviously a rendered document:
```
f="FILE"
printf '\n───── 📄 %s · rendered by glance ─────\n\n' "$(basename "$f")"
glance-render "$f"          # add --theme NAME, -w COLS, or -l for light
printf '\n─────────────────────── end ───────────────────────\n'
```
Themed ANSI to stdout: headings, syntax-highlighted code, aligned tables. You can run this yourself; no terminal takeover needed.

Then signpost it. Claude Code collapses long tool output, so the user can miss that a render is there. Begin your reply with a clear line such as: "📄 Rendered FILE with glance below — expand the output (Ctrl+O) to read it." Don't leave the user to discover it.
Interactive read — for scrolling, the table of contents, the theme picker, or following [[wikilinks]], the user runs the full TUI themselves:

"To read it interactively: glance FILE (you can run it here with !glance FILE)." Don't try to launch the TUI from a tool call — it needs the user's terminal.

First time

If glance-render / glance aren't found, point the user at the install steps (clone + make install; deps brew install md4c notcurses pkg-config) and offer the inline preview once it's available.

The offer, in practice

After saving a doc: "Want me to preview that with glance?" — then on a yes run the framed glance-render above, open your reply with the "📄 Rendered … — expand (Ctrl+O)" signpost, and mention the interactive glance FILE option for a longer read.