Hey @y2w8, thanks for picking this up. custom_css is something a lot of users want. Before merging there are two bugs to fix, and I'd like to propose a different design that matches how comparable tools handle this.

Bugs

1. The preview loads unstyled. The diff moves the bundled CSS into assets/style.css and adds <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">, but write_index is not updated to copy style.css into the workspace. The workspace only contains index.html and content.md, so the browser's GET /style.css returns 404. The PR description says the stylesheet is "inlined into the generated index.html via a <style> tag" but the code doesn't do that. Easy to verify: apply the PR, run :MarkdownPreview on any file.

2. custom_css injection crashes on % in CSS. The code does:

content = content:gsub("</head>", "<style>\n" .. css .. "\n</style>\n</head>")

In gsub, the replacement string treats % as an escape. %0 through %9 are capture references and %% is a literal %. Any other % raises invalid use of '%' in replacement string. Common CSS like width: 100% will throw. Use the function form instead:

content = content:gsub("</head>", function() return "<style>\n" .. css .. "\n</style>\n</head>" end)

Function returns are inserted literally, no escaping needed.

Suggested design

Instead of extracting the bundled CSS into a separate file, I think the cleaner approach is:

1. Keep the bundled <style> block where it is in index.html. Avoids the static-file copy problem and keeps the preview self-contained.
2. Make custom_css accept either a string or a list of strings so users can layer multiple stylesheets:

   custom_css = "~/.config/nvim/md-preview.css"
   -- or
   custom_css = { "~/themes/base.css", "~/themes/overrides.css" }

3. Copy each user CSS file into the workspace as user-N.css in write_index, then emit <link rel="stylesheet" href="user-N.css"> tags from a new placeholder like __USER_CSS__. Bundled styles load first, user styles last, so the cascade wins naturally without !important.
4. Use vim.fn.expand for paths so ~ and $VAR work. Warn and skip on missing files (you already do this).
5. Optional but cheap: a uv.fs_event per user CSS path that calls ls_server.reload for hot reload. Matches what VSCode, Marked, and Obsidian do.

This pattern matches what most editor-class tools do (VSCode markdown.styles, Pandoc --css, Obsidian snippets). The single-file-replaces-everything approach in iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim is widely cited as painful because users end up forking the whole stylesheet to tweak one rule.

Want me to push a follow-up commit on your branch, or would you rather update yourself?

Yes, please do and thanks for the detailed review.

3. Copy each user CSS file into the workspace as user-N.css in write_index, then emit <link rel="stylesheet" href="user-N.css"> tags from a new placeholder like __USER_CSS__. Bundled styles load first, user styles last, so the cascade wins naturally without !important.

4. Use vim.fn.expand for paths so ~ and $VAR work. Warn and skip on missing files (you already do this).

5. Optional but cheap: a uv.fs_event per user CSS path that calls ls_server.reload for hot reload. Matches what VSCode, Marked, and Obsidian do.

This pattern matches what most editor-class tools do (VSCode markdown.styles, Pandoc --css, Obsidian snippets). The single-file-replaces-everything approach in iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim is widely cited as painful because users end up forking the whole stylesheet to tweak one rule.

Want me to push a follow-up commit on your branch, or would you rather update yourself?

@selimacerbas Honestly I'm not very familiar with the Lua/Nvim APIs or live_server internals yet 😅

If you could implement those changes directly. Your proposed approach makes a lot more sense than my current implementation, especially the hot reload.

I’ll handle making custom_css accept either a string or a list.
Thanks again for the detailed review.