github.com/charmbracelet/glow

Glow excels as a standalone CLI application for rendering markdown beautifully in the terminal. The command-line interface is intuitive with sensible defaults - just run `glow file.md` and you get gorgeous output. The TUI for browsing local markdown files is polished and the cloud stash feature works seamlessly.

As a Go library, the experience is more constrained. The package primarily exposes its rendering engine through relatively simple APIs. Documentation focuses heavily on CLI usage rather than library integration patterns. You can import the rendering components, but there aren't many examples showing programmatic usage. Type safety is solid since it's Go, but the API surface for embedding glow's functionality into your own applications feels somewhat limited compared to its CLI capabilities.

Error handling is straightforward when it occurs, though most errors relate to file I/O or invalid markdown rather than library misuse. The rendering pipeline itself is quite forgiving. For teams wanting to add beautiful markdown rendering to their Go CLIs, it works well, but expect to read source code to understand advanced integration patterns.

Glow is primarily a standalone CLI application for rendering markdown in the terminal, and it shows when you try to use it as a library. The core rendering functionality works well for basic use cases, but the package structure assumes you're building a TUI application rather than embedding markdown rendering into a service.

The rendering engine itself is solid and handles most markdown variants correctly, but there are no configuration hooks for resource limits, timeouts, or memory bounds when processing large documents. The style system is powerful but heavily coupled to the Bubble Tea framework, making it awkward to extract just the rendering logic. Error handling is basic - you get errors back, but there's minimal context for debugging malformed input or understanding failures in production.

For production services, you'll need to wrap the rendering calls with your own timeouts and resource limits. There's no built-in observability, connection pooling isn't relevant here, and retry logic would be your responsibility. The API surface is small, which is good, but lacks the configuration flexibility needed for diverse deployment scenarios.

Glow is a terminal markdown renderer that's straightforward to integrate into CLI applications. The core API is simple - you feed it markdown strings and it renders them beautifully in the terminal. From a security perspective, it's primarily a rendering library with limited external data handling, which keeps the attack surface small. The dependency tree is reasonable for a Go project, mostly pulling in Charm's own well-maintained libraries.

The main security consideration is when rendering untrusted markdown. The library uses Goldmark under the hood, which handles malicious markdown reasonably well, but you should still sanitize user input before rendering. Error handling is clean and doesn't leak sensitive information - failures typically relate to terminal capabilities or rendering issues. The library doesn't deal with authentication, network requests (beyond optional fetching features you can disable), or cryptographic operations in its core rendering path.

One notable gap: when using Glow's built-in fetching capabilities for remote markdown, there's limited control over TLS configuration and certificate validation. If you need strict control over network security, handle fetching yourself and pass sanitized content to the renderer.