Previewr

Previewr renders Markdown and reStructuredText documents as a website and automatically refreshes when the source has changed.

A preview like this is helpful if you write texts for documentations (MkDocs, Sphinx - you name it) and don't want to build the entire project after every small modification.

Previewr is a command line tool and therefore independent of any text editors, which means it just works with you favourite editor. The command line interface is relatively straightforward. The command previewr is followed by the path to the document that shall be rendered.

$ previewr README.md
INFO: Running at http://localhost:8000

The layout of the rendered page is kept simple and functional. Also very useful for bigger documents is the automatically generated table of contents section on the left.

The project was designed and implemented by myself. Previewr is based on Tornado, a small and moderately simple web framework with WebSockets support. WebSockets are also the secret ingredient for live reloading. Third-party libraries were used for Markdown and reStructuredText rendering.