ramble

Read your notes in the terminal, and follow them wherever they link.

ramble is a fast, read-only markdown reader for the terminal, with vim keys and a browser's links. It renders pages properly, follows wikilinks and relative links with gd, comes back with C-o, and knows your whole notebook: backlinks, full-text search and tags with no setup.

Why it's good

• Links are links. Pagers like glow and bat print a link as text. ramble follows it, keeps history, and answers "what links here?".
• It understands your notebook. Links resolve through the built-in mdroots index, which reads zk, Obsidian, marksman and relative-path styles. Nothing to install, and nothing is written into your notes.
• It renders well. Reflowed prose, tables, highlighted code, GitHub alerts, LaTeX drawn as Unicode, folded front matter.
• Your fingers already know it. Vim motions, search, marks, visual mode and y (copying the markdown source, over OSC 52, so it works through SSH and tmux). Press g? for every key and pause mid-sequence for hints.
• It never touches your files. <leader>o opens $EDITOR at the line you're on, and ramble reloads when you're back.
• It previews while you write. In a tmux split beside your editor it re-renders on save and, with --follow, keeps up with your cursor (setup).
• It reviews. cc leaves a comment on a line; <leader>rr sends the batch to a person or an agent.

What it isn't

• An editor. It hands off to yours.
• A pager. --print renders once to stdout, and that's it.
• An Obsidian replacement. No images, diagrams, graph view or note creation.

Install

From crates.io:

cargo install ramble

Prebuilt binaries for macOS (Apple silicon) and Linux (x86_64, aarch64) are on the releases page, or with mise: mise use -g github:martintrojer/ramble. From a checkout: cargo install --path . --bin ramble.

Use

ramble notes/            # browse a folder
ramble notes/index.md    # read a file
cat README.md | ramble   # read stdin
tmux split-window -h ramble --follow README.md  # live preview that follows your editor

No config needed. ramble --init-config writes every option, commented out.

More

• Guide: features, keys, sidebar, following your editor, comments, tmux, launchers
• Default config: every option, with its default
• Design: how it works and why

Young and moving fast. MIT licensed.