Render Markdown in Emacs buffer

Is it possible to present Markdown rendered in an Emacs buffer using Emacs' own buffer text formatting capabilities? Emacs in graphical environments has rich text presentation capabilities (font styles, colors, links and even images) so it should be quite possible. Are there any existing implementations?

Note that the idea is to have the rendered Markdown be native Emacs formatted text that can be navigated and operated on as any other text in Emacs. Therefore solutions that render to an image that is embedded in an Emacs buffer are not desirable here.

Also note that this is not about a mode for editing Markdown, but for presenting rendered Markdown in an Emacs buffer. It should preferably be a pure Emacs Lisp solution for portability.

Personally, I use the following workflow:

• run on a C-c C-c m to run Mark­down on the cur­rent buffer and pre­view the out­put in an­other buffer.
• move to html-mode on this other buffer (M-x html-mode)
• hide the html tags to display something close to the output (M-x sgml-tags-invisible)

Then every time you want to refresh the rendering, simply run again C-c C-c m on the markdown buffer.

Yet I confess until now for Markdown editing/previewing, nothing beats for me Textmate and its markdown preview panel. Actually, from a personal perspective, the only case where I prefer to run Textmate rather than Emacs is when I want to edit markdown files. Yet the path to have the same quality of preview on emacs is not so difficult and probably I should investigate it. As I see it, it's simply:

• get the internal css used by Textmate for rendering the preview
• use w3 or w3m to preview the markdown output using this css

I guess you can use the source code of latex-preview for inspiration or pretty-lambda(a much simpler piece of software).

Alternatively you can convert the markdown to html in a background process and preview the html.

Everything is possible in Emacs, but not everything is easily achieved :-)

I have this in my .emacs file:

(custom-set-faces
 ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
 '(markdown-header-delimiter-face ((t (:inherit font-lock-function-name-face :underline t :weight bold))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-1 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :height 1.5))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-2 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :height 1.3))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-3 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :underline t :height 1.2))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-4 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :underline t :height 1.1))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-5 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :underline t))) t)
 '(markdown-header-face-6 ((t (:inherit markdown-header-face :underline t))) t))
(put 'set-goal-column 'disabled nil)

which enlarges all the headlines. Markdown-mode itself will italicize starred text and boldface double-starred text, so this will get you there. However, it will not make the control characters invisible.

If you want that, you should probably look into pretty-lambda for examples (as Bozhidar Batsov suggested)