Building a Simple Markdown Viewer with GirFFI
Posted by matijs 17/04/2012 at 07h41
This morning, I found myself looking for a simple markdown previewer that would run on the desktop. Using GirFFI, it was ridiculously easy to create it myself.
The simple version, based on the Webkit example in the GirFFI repository, goes something like this:
require 'ffi-gtk3'
require 'github/markup'
GirFFI.setup :WebKit, ’3.0’
Gtk.init
win = Gtk::Window.new :toplevel
scr = Gtk::ScrolledWindow.new nil, nil
wv = WebKit::WebView.new
win.add scr
scr.add wv
win.set_default_geometry 700, 500
win.show_all
file = ARGV[0]
fullpath = File.expand_path(file, Dir.pwd)
html = GitHub::Markup.render fullpath
wv.load_string html, nil, nil, "file://#{fullpath}"
GObject.signal_connect(win, "destroy") { Gtk.main_quit }
Gtk.main
I got the basic version working in about 10 minutes. The more complex version adds a keyboard handler to allow reloading the viewed file.