Show HN: Mdx – Execute your Markdown code blocks, now in Go

For Obsidian users, I'm a fan of the Execute Code[0] plugin which allows exexution of codeblocks straight from your notes.

[0]: https://github.com/twibiral/obsidian-execute-code

This is a great tool for writing technical documentation sites. It will allow you to run tests on your code samples, ensuring that they are up to date and working with the most recent library release. We were in progress of doing this with Shopify.dev before I left.

Similar in Ruby/shameless pluck:

https://github.com/coezbek/baker

I call this a Project-Setup-as-Code tool.

Supports backticks for shell and triple backticks for executing Ruby code.

If blocks are successfully executed they are marked as done (using markdown [x] checkboxes). So you can incrementally run a file without executing stuff twice.

Cool, at last we can now `curl | mdx` Github readmes instead of copy pasting `curl | bash` from them!

I'd like to commend you on building something and putting it out in there in the world, keep doing that! Also the idea of running commands and code from Markdown is obviously awesome. I think you'll find that the folks you get to use this will want a ton more features, like project wide config, interactive stdin, .ENV tooling, passing of variables between inputs and a lot more. That's why we built runme.dev, the kernel is built in Go, please come join our community and contribute.

Cool idea. Stuff like this reminds me why I like the vim ecosystem so much. At least since the introduction of terminal buffers, most people I know that use vim for serious code work have a form of "send text under cursor to shell"

Congratulations! Nice work.

If you like this, another similar tool, though one specifically geared towards builds, is xc.

https://xcfile.dev/

I would prefer an api base on codeblocks meta string and json attributes.

```sh name="build" deps=["install"]

npm run build

```

This would be displayed just fine in github, as it is valid gfm.

Can you compare to https://github.com/bashup/mdsh ?

ah, someone has reimplemented another feature of Org Mode.

Well, this will mean Org files exported to Markdown can remain executable just like they were in Emacs, so maybe this makes Org Babel more valuable as well, for those of us that prefer a structured markup language for notes and literate programming

And thanks to pandoc it's not hard to go back and forth

reminds me a lot of rmarkdown - which allows you to run many languages in a similar fashion https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/

Could use some more (or better?) examples of how this can be useful.

This is really cool, I was just thinking recently about something like that. What do you plan to add to it next? What do you think of Go?

cf. rundown https://github.com/elseano/rundown

It is similar to how CoffeeScript literate works.

See also https://github.com/jpillora/md-tmpl

I wrote something similar, but for the web. I call it "Literate Markdown" (https://simpatico.io/lit.md) and you write markdown and your html/css/js/md code blocks are both exposed as text and as code blocks for execution in the browser. The format expects to a) be transformed and exposed by a special server (https://simpatico.io/reflector.md) and b) rendered in a browser. This code also includes a simple test harness that, for example, turns the favicon green/red depending on if exceptions are thrown in your code (https://simpatico.io/testable.js) I also wrote an acceptance test that loads most of the interesting parts of the site in iframes and combines their test output (https://simpatico.io/acceptance). That page also has notes for using headless chrome to run the tests. Also, the server (lazily) caches all transforms with file watcher invalidation, disallows 3rd party cookies, and starts up instantly.

The central use case is to have a fun and fast way to play with browser code, using your favorite editor, and literate programming techniques. All while being open source, local first, and minimalist.

The repo (https://github.com/javajosh/simpatico/) is not yet npm/npx compatible so you have to fork and run. This is a local first, minimalist project that has ~2 small dependencies, which themselves have no deps, so publishing was not a priority.

Eventually I'd like to automate an md-> js process, such that the md is the canonical source for javascript and the final js is a build product. I'd also like to clean up the code and publish to npm, but sadly someone is squatting on the @simpatico handle and npm won't do anything. :(

You might want to reconsider the name. MDX is already a well-known technology that combines markdown with JSX https://github.com/mdx-js/mdx/

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