I work mostly from the terminal these days. Thanks to Claude Code, it’s been a while since I opened Cursor. I honestly can’t remember the last time I opened VSCode.

While I feel pretty elite tinkering away in the terminal, sometimes I just want to see rendered Markdown or glance at pretty-printed syntax. Sure, I could open an IDE to preview markdown – and maybe I should – but I don’t.

GitHub is useless for local changes I haven’t pushed yet. File explorers and browsers are mostly meh or I just want them to do more.

So I built gh-here, a GitHub-style interface for any local directory running on localhost:5555.

What It Does

Run gh-here in any directory. It launches a low rent version of GitHub on localhost but for your local files.

• Renders markdown mostly properly
• Browse files and folders
• Read and edit files
• Syntax highlighting for lots of things
• File search
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Works instantly

How I Use It Daily

# Working on a feature
$ claude -p "do a bunch of stuff and crank out a bunch of files"
$ gh-here # Quick visual check, read stuff, browse stuff
$ git add . && git commit

# Exploring someone's project
$ git clone interesting-repo
$ cd interesting-repo  
$ gh-here 

# Random directory of photos on Desktop
$ gh-here # Browse

It’s a quick bridge between terminal work and GitHub, nothing more, nothing less.

Current State

It’s still early and needs a lot of love, but I’m using it surprisingly often. Maybe you’ll find it useful too.

I’ve been asking Claude to keep it lean: no React, no heavy build ecosystem – mostly just HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Get It

cd ~/to/some/source/directory
npx gh-here

Open localhost:5555 and browse your code like it’s already on (a rough facsimile of) GitHub. PRs very much welcome but FYI I’m likely going to be slow on merging.