Pygments for syntax highlighting

BYR: This is not a tutorial.

Syntax highlighting is a procedure to generated color decorated result of a plain code text input. Because the plian code is usually hard to read while is becomming longer. For example:

def ruby_code
  puts 'string should be another color'
end

Compare to

def ruby_code
  puts 'string should be another color'
end

Thus we need a fancy way to make our code text into some color decorated result to help us to read.

code_ray is quite famous and popular lib that could found on google, while searching syntax highlighter for jekyll, so I just installed it first. Soon that I’ve just found it’s only support about 20 languages and seems not easy to add custom lexer. This lack of languages variaty made me feel there should be something more powerful. Then I just googled again, and found another worth competitor that makes me feel worth to try – pygments.

Using pygments is as simple as code_ray. Just add a gem called pygments.rb to the Gemfile, and bundle install that’s it. After installed the gem, just take an excited heart to open your page refresh in browser and check the result.

Sadly there is nothing when I firstly done this. The main point is that I just forget to add some styling element for the generated markups. Again, I just add a bunch of code highlighting styles from the internet. And BANG! the colored syntax just appeared in the refreshed page. OMG, this is really awesome.