Basalt icon

Basalt

A lightweight terminal-first Markdown viewer for macOS.

⬇ Download for macOS (Universal)   ·   View on GitHub

What it does

  • Open one or many Markdown files straight from the terminal
  • Pipe content in via stdin — cat notes.md | basalt
  • Expand directories recursively
  • Watch a directory and open new files as they appear
  • Render local images and Markdown links
  • 9 built-in themes, switchable with Cmd+Shift+P
  • Manage windows from the terminal (basalt windows list / close)

Install

  1. Download the zip above and unzip it
  2. Drag Basalt.app to your /Applications folder
  3. Run ./bin/install-cli from the repo to get the basalt CLI command

First launch: Basalt is not notarized. Right-click → Open to bypass Gatekeeper.

Usage

# Open files
basalt notes.md report.json ./docs

# Pipe content
cat README.md | basalt

# Watch a directory
basalt watch ./output

# Manage windows
basalt windows list
basalt windows close notes.md

Themes

Switch themes with Cmd+Shift+P (or Ctrl+Shift+P on non-Mac):

Theme Style
Obsidian Night Dark, neutral
Graph Paper Light, minimal
Moss Grove Dark green
Arc Reactor Dark blue
Foundry Steel Industrial dark
HUD Crimson Dark red
Helios Gold Warm amber
Kanagawa Lotus Soft dark
Gruvbox Light Warm light

Requirements

  • macOS 11+ (Intel or Apple Silicon)
  • For the CLI: basalt binary on your PATH