Minimal fast Markdown widget

[timesler]

One thing that I think would be super useful, particularly for AI agent applications, would be a version of the textual markdown widget that is a single DOM node for maximizing performance.

I'd imaging this would be possible by taking rich.markdown.Markdown and making sure it supports textual themes and uses the markdown style improvements from textual.

Personally, if there was a Markdown widget that respected app theme, that would be all I'd need for most use cases and I think could enable support of very long chat histories.

At some point, I hope to find some time to have a go at building this, but curious if there's already work in flight that would make it redundant

[willmcgugan]

There is little benefit to be had from that. The Markdown widget can already handle very large documents.

If you were to implement a Markdown widget with the line API, you would lose or have to rebuild text selection, custom styling, block customization, horizontal scrolling of code fences, incremental parsing / rendering, and a lot more besides.

You would gain faster rendering of large documents in one shot if the Markdown is a single widget, but if we are talking output from AI that tends to be built up incrementally anyway.