Syntax Highlighting Exterior Your Editor – A Checklist Aside

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Whether or not you’re giving a chat, sharing work together with your crew, or presenting work to your shoppers, there comes a time if you’ll want to indicate code exterior of a textual content editor. Copying and pasting code from a textual content editor to say, Keynote, is a straightforward course of. The difficulties are available in if you wish to protect syntax highlighting, which is essential to bringing code to life.

I’m within the midst of constructing a couple of talks that comprise a number of code, so I’ve been exploring instruments to enhance my workflow from my editor of selection, Chic Textual content, to Keynote. I used to be on the lookout for the simplest solution to copy code as wealthy textual content—with my most well-liked colour scheme, font face, and font dimension utilized—to be pasted instantly into Keynote.

The primary device I attempted was a Chic Textual content bundle, put in with Bundle Management, known as SublimeHighlight. With SublimeHighlight put in, you’ll be able to choose code and set off a command to repeat the code to your clipboard as wealthy textual content.

Constructed on prime of Pygments, it’s a very nice bundle for Chic Textual content that matches my workflow completely. Nevertheless, the obtainable format choices didn’t really feel in depth or highly effective, and I gave the impression to be doing a number of tweaking in Keynote. The pace of copying instantly out of Chic Textual content was outweighed by the point I spent in Keynote.

I started on the lookout for a device that will permit me to spend much less time tweaking types in Keynote, and located Spotlight, a command line utility with a terrifying quantity of documentation. Worry not; the educational curve is low, and the chances are infinite. To put in it, both comply with the directions, or if you happen to’re operating OS X and Homebrew, simply run brew set up spotlight.

To attain my direct-to-Keynote nirvana, I performed with the obtainable command line choices a bit till I used to be glad. What I got here up with regarded like this:

spotlight -O rtf -t 2 -Ok 40 -k 'Supply Code Professional' --style twilight _output.js | pbcopy

Although verbose, it’s not as difficult because it seems: -O rtf units the output format to wealthy textual content, -t 2 units tabs to 2 areas, -Ok 40 units font dimension to 40, and -k 'Supply Code Professional' units the font face to Supply Code Professional, my most well-liked font face. I created a theme to match my most well-liked colour scheme, Twilight, and specify its use by together with --style twilight. To make use of this with out the customized theme, simply depart the --style twilight out.

The ultimate bit, _output.js | pbcopy, tells Spotlight to run _output.js, the file containing code to be processed, by its formatter and replica the outcomes to the clipboard. All I’ve to do is run that line, paste into Keynote, and I’ve a wonderfully formatted chunk of code.

It’s not the proper workflow by any means, however I like the quantity of flexibility and management Spotlight gives. You possibly can see how I’ve been making heavy use of this device in talks that I’ve posted to Speaker Deck.