Syntax highlighters... again @ declension systems

Syntax highlighters... again

Posted July 2016

Code

It looks pretty when it’s right, doesn’t it? Quite hard to say what that is sometimes, and in my experience working with a lot of developers over the years, it’s pretty subjective too.

This blog

The current version of this blog now uses Hakyll, which uses Kate’s highlighting… but I found the default styling somewhat lacking especially for Python.

However a static blog with in-browser highlighting (à la prettify.js or highlight.js) seemed a shame

Customising Kate

The default styling doesn’t play nicely with Foundation (v6, at least) so a little hacking was necessary:

pre.sourceCode {
    border: 1px;
    background-color: hsl(0, 0, 96);
    border-radius: 0.25rem;
    padding: 0.25rem 0.5rem;
    margin-bottom: 1rem;
}

pre.sourceCode * {
    font-family: 'Inconsolata', sans-serif;
    font-weight: 400;
    border: none;
    background: inherit;
}

I also ended up “adding” a few more colours / styling with Python as a benchmark, as it was looking decidedly monochrome for a while.

Testing it out

Some random snippets across languages.

Haskell

fac n = foldr (*) 1 [1..n]

match "pages/*" $ do
        route   $ composeRoutes (dropPrefix "pages/") directoryify
        compile $ pandocCompiler
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/default.html" defaultContext
            >>= relativizeUrls

Python

import site
print "\n".join(site.getsitepackages())
def foo(bar=False):
    rgx = re.compile(r'(\s+[a-z0-9]*)$')
    return map(lambda x: rgx.str(x), [bar])

Shell

$ xargs -I@ find @/quodlibet/ext/ -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type d -exec basename {} \;  -o -regex '.*[a-z]\.py' -exec basename {} \; | sort

Not beautiful, but could be worse!