Syntax highlighting using Pygments

2 mins
blog pygments

I've added a new feature to mdsh: syntax highlighting for code blocks.

A new option has been added to .site_config, which lets you choose the highlighing theme - currently only monokai is supported, so is set as the default theme.

Setup syntax highlighting

To get it working, you simpy need to install Pygments, and then mdsh will do the rest!

You can install Pygments using the pip package manager, if you have it installed:

pip install Pygments

Or, if you don't have pip installed, on Ubuntu and Debian, you can install Pygments like so:

sudo apt-get install python3-pygments

Using syntax highlighting

When you create or edit a blog post or page, you should create the code block using the GitHub flavoured extension, supplying the language name after the triple backticks ("code fences").

Here is an example block of shell code:

 var="foo"
 echo ${var//foo/bar} # outputs 'bar'

Disclaimer: Pygments is quite slow - large code blocks may take a while to process, and the highlighted HTML output is a larger filesize than without.

Further improvements

  • add more themes as assets/css/pygments-{theme}.css
  • the theme can then be changed using setup or by editing .site_config
  • allow setting Pygments options, such as headers, line numbers, etc.
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