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Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

craig.is

21–30 of 34 posts

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#22
post #19

Why do people make pages highlighting colorizing things, and then make the subtitle of the page (and other text) be blue on black? This does not inspire confidence.

Purple and orange and green and white on dark blue. My eyes hurt reading this. Pick a couple of colors with relatively high contrast, and make sure the text isn't lighter than the background.

I ported a theme called Tricolre across which is much more subdued, the pull request[1] just got accepted a few minutes ago. Hopefully I can get a few more themes done, they're very simple to create. The joy of open source is that if there's something you don't like about someone's code, you can just fork it and make whatever changes you want.

[1]: https://github.com/ccampbell/rainbow/pull/3

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#23

I would love to see a javascript highliter that consumes TextMate syntax definitions.

The problems I see are:

1. TM syntaxes are complicated. There's lots of undocumented features that bundles find ways to use in crucial places.

2. TM is slow. You don't see this so much because it's written in C++ and there's many clever optimizations (see point 1). But it's difficult to get around the fact that a syntax is hundreds of regexes that have to be run over the whole document in a pathologically slow manner. I hate to think what it would be like in JS.

3. Many TM language definitions are dependent on features of the Oniguruma regex engine, which is strictly more powerful than any JS one. So you basically have to compile Oniguruma (no mean feat) ...with emscripten.

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#25
post #17

So... why should I use this instead of http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/ ?

Hehe, I was just going to suggest running Rainbow against highlight.js's test suite. I doubt it would do nearly as well. Sagalaev's highlighter is awesome, he put a lot of work into it.

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#26

I would love to see a javascript highliter that consumes TextMate syntax definitions.

The problems I see are: 1. TM syntaxes are complicated . There's lots of undocumented features that bundles find ways to use in crucial places. 2. TM is slow. You don't see this so much because it's written in C++ and there's many clever optimizations (see point 1). But it's difficult to get around the fact that a syntax is hundreds of regexes that have to be run over the whole document in a pathologically slow manne…

This is very unfortunate, I'm never satisfied with syntax highliting and color schemes except in Sublime/TextMate. I've found it to support much more unique bits of grammar in code than vim's syntax highliting and there are tons of great themes available for it.

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#27
post #17

So... why should I use this instead of http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/ ?

You shouldn't. There are just too many errors in highlighting.

This thing was written in ~2 weeks, so there's no way it can compete with a project that's 2 years old! It can either stagnate or evolve, but I think that the way the code is laid out will encourage a lot of collaboration. Personally, I love and use Highlight, but (I confess, as a textmate ho) I'd like to see rainbow improve. Competition is always good. Maybe you guys can/should help each other?

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't. There are just too many errors in highlighting.

This thing was written in ~2 weeks, so there's no way it can compete with a project that's 2 years old! It can either stagnate or evolve, but I think that the way the code is laid out will encourage a lot of collaboration. Personally, I love and use Highlight, but (I confess, as a textmate ho) I'd like to see rainbow improve. Competition is always good. Maybe you guys can/should help each other?

Correction: highlight.js is 6 years old :-). And yes, I'm going to look into Rainbow more properly for useful ideas. And I encourage Craig to do the same. Isn't Open Source awesome? :-)

Re: Rainbow.js - code syntax highlighting in 1.2kb

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thing was written in ~2 weeks, so there's no way it can compete with a project that's 2 years old! It can either stagnate or evolve, but I think that the way the code is laid out will encourage a lot of collaboration. Personally, I love and use Highlight, but (I confess, as a textmate ho) I'd like to see rainbow improve. Competition is always good. Maybe you guys can/should help each other?

Correction: highlight.js is 6 years old :-). And yes, I'm going to look into Rainbow more properly for useful ideas. And I encourage Craig to do the same. Isn't Open Source awesome? :-)

It is. And holy crap, 6 years, wow... time flies! I'm keeping track of both of you now. I know that collaboration on projects like these is almost impossible. Do you guys live near e/o? heh
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