Viewing markdown files in chrome or chromium

You would think that this feature, formatting marked down texts as HTML,  would be built in, i.e. going to

         file:///home/me/project/README.md

would transform markdown "lightweight markup" to HTML. E.g. the marked down text below

---

# Scripts and Makefile to install tools

Just typing
```
make
```
will install the packages x, y and z globally, 
i.e. in [/usr/local/bin](/usr/local/bin) and friends. You can install
things separately as well, e.g. the following will all work as expected.
``` bash
make x
make y
make z
```
[Make](https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html) is a very old 
but extremely powerful tool to manage (re)creating things that have 
dependencies.

---

should result in a nicely formatted html page like so:

Unfortunately, chrome does not do that. So we look for an extension that will do the job of converting every file with a name ending with ".md" to html as illustrated above. Pointing your browser to chrome://extensions/ will show you the extensions that you already have installed. At the end there is a link "Get more extensions"  that points to the Chrome web store. The upper left corner there contains an input text area to specify what you are looking for. Thus searching for "markdown" yields -- at the time of writing this post -- exactly 2 candidate extensions, namely "Markdown Preview Plus" by www.ooso.net   and "Markdown Preview" by Boris Smus.

Both are free and claim exactly the same: "Converts and previews markdown files (.md, .markdown) to HTML right inside Chrome.".

The difference is that the first one, "Markdown Preview Plus" works while the other one doesn't. Moreover, it seems that the "Plus" one is actively developed on GitHub. In fact, we can safely assume that the "Plus" version is the successor of the other one which had a last commit on github in 2013. On the "Plus" github site, it is explicitly stated that the extension is a fork of the original one by Boris Smus.

Anyway, problem solved.

PS The first release of Make dates from 1977, thus it is 40 years old at the time of this writing. It must do something good, compare to many other 'tools/languages/..' of the day that quickly fade into oblivion.

Instant word translation without clicking on chrome

Chrome, at least version 43.0.2357.65 (64 bit) on Ubuntu 14.04 supports translating selected text where the translation pops up next to the original, as shown in the screen shots below.

First select word, then click on icon to see translation.

That is a lot of work, especially if your vocabulary is substandard.

Luckily, there is a chrome extension called Transover by artemave.

With this extension installed (I restarted chrome just to be sure it would be active),  you get translations pop up just by hovering longer than a certain time (this can be set in the options) over a word.

No need to click at all, just rest..

Moreover, you get more information than with the standard translation that makes a misguided effort to select the best one for you. Well worth installing.