Highlight.js VS rangy

> it was designed to resemble C#

I actually first heard of Vala just a few days ago when I was looking at a C#-related PR[1] for highlight.js:

> This fails the tests as the Vala default.txt is recognized now as C#. However, Vala is very close in syntax to C#, and the default.txt also seems to be valid C# so not sure what to do about this.

[1] https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/pull/3906

About GitHub Source - https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/issues/1224

Let's get started by installing the highlight js

Luckily, implementing syntax highlighting in our simple code editor is easy with the use of external libraries. There are several JavaScript libraries available, such as Prism and Highlight.js. For our editor, we'll use Prism since it's easy to use and supports a wide range of programming languages.

They do actually document the recommended path in their GitHub docs: https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js#GettingTheLibrar...

The templates grabs Markdown file data with XMLHttpRequest and converts it to HTML with https://showdownjs.com/ . Classless styles are done with https://picocss.com/ and code block syntax highlighting is done with https://highlightjs.org/ .

GitHub repo: https://github.com/dandalpiaz/markdown-pages

My search for a third-party syntax highlighter brought me to highlight.js. ctil converts text (.txt) and Markdown (.md) to generated HTML (.html) files, so I want the generated HTML files to support syntax highlighting. highlight.js can be used as HTML Tags by using a Content Delivery Network, CDN, so I was able to add highlight.js by adding the following lines to the generated HTML files:

The real magic is what happens once you generate the syntax trees; at that point, you can modify them with the existing plugins (or make you own, if you really want to). For instance, I use a plugin to add specific css classes to certain elements so they integrate better with the visual design of the website another to add code highlighting with highlight.js and some others for generating a js object from the frontmatter of a Markdown file and to add support for Github flavored Markdown. I could do a lot more with these, like add support for videos, embeds and more, but for now this is enough for a simple preview.

pre is for a block of preformatted text, so spaces are preserved, and the font can be monospaced. Another element is code for programming codes. Notice that code doesn't offer code highlighting; for this, use JavaScript + CSS code, like Highlight.js.

Working with contenteditable, execCommand, and rangy (shoutout to timdown who was the ultimate resource for everything caret-related), to get just a somewhat decent experience, is still to this day one of the most frustrating and things I've ever done.

Enter Rangy. It makes working with user selection, a walk in the park. Unfortunately, it is outdated and hasn't been maintained for some time, but I still found it stable and simple. With some experimentation I was able to load it onto my app and I'm not exaggerating when I say: it saved lots of hours. Hats off to the author.