Dustrown

Dead simple desktop Markdown viewer built with Rust.

• Linux backend: GTK3 + WebKit2GTK
• Windows backend: wry + WebView2

Screenshot

Features

• Open Markdown files from a simple in-window menu bar.
• Open/close/toggle/quit with keyboard shortcuts (works well on i3/minimal WMs).
• Render Markdown as HTML in a desktop window.
• GitHub-inspired Markdown styling.
• Baseline hardening for untrusted files (HTML sanitization + JavaScript disabled).
• Toggle light/dark theme from the menu bar.
• Close currently opened file without quitting the app.

Build and Run

cargo run

Open a file directly from CLI:

cargo run -- /path/to/file.md

Release binary:

cargo build --release
./target/release/dustrown

Shortcuts:

• Ctrl+O open file
• Ctrl+W close file
• Ctrl+D toggle light/dark
• Ctrl+Q quit

Linux Runtime Requirements

This app uses GTK3 + WebKit2GTK on Linux. Install runtime/dev packages for your distro.

For Debian/Ubuntu-like systems (example package names):

sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev

Package names vary by distribution.

Windows Runtime Requirements

Windows backend requires WebView2 runtime (usually present on modern Windows 10/11).

Notes for i3/minimal WMs

Menus are rendered inside the app window and do not depend on desktop/global menu integrations.

GitHub Actions Release Pipeline

This repository includes a cross-platform release workflow at .github/workflows/release.yml.

• Builds release artifacts for:
  • Linux x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
  • Windows x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
• Trigger options:
  • push a tag matching v* (for example v0.2.0)
  • run manually with GitHub Actions workflow_dispatch
• Release artifacts produced:
  • dustrown-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
  • dustrown-windows-x86_64.zip

Create a tagged release

git tag v0.2.0
git push origin v0.2.0

When the tag workflow completes, GitHub Release assets are attached automatically.