Highlight.js VS unified

> 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.

From TFA:

> My idea was that surely it's possible to write a bunch of markdown, and then have that get wrapped in a bunch of JSX tags that come pre-styled, using the styles of your existing repo? For example, what I expected was to be able to write *test* (Markdown for bold) and then get a component that looked liketest where is a library-defined React component

It surely is possible, so perhaps I can share some links if others are wondering the same thing.

If you like to roll your own solution for that, you can use the unified ecosystem: https://unifiedjs.com/

However, if you want JSX just do what everyone does and reach for MDX:

Styling the blog, figure out the eco-system within UnifiedJs, remark-rehype, oh boy, I could write another blog with that.

To build the Markdown editor (and the preview, mostly), I decided to use unified, an ecosystem of tools allowing the developer to parse a format into an abstract tree and back into another format (for example, markdown to html) and modify said tree (for example, to add specific classes to certain html elements before they are converted to an actual html string. The basics of how to do so can be found in this article, but they mostly consist of:

It’ll take you a few hours to become proficient in the “unified” syntax tree libraries. So worth it. Easy fully customized conversion to/from html, react, plain text, markdown, you name it. https://unifiedjs.com/

Why universal? Because a lot of languages are simillar in a bunch of ways and it might be good to reuse existing parts of the compiler to speed up the process of writing new DSLs for example. Also a pretty big use-case is not for compilers itself but just for transformers like Markdown to HTML, there are already a lot of libraries (like https://github.com/unifiedjs/unified for ASTs and https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ for parsing) that try achieve similar goals but they are not working together.

Unified is a framework to process Markdown. It's a plugin-based tool that allows you to inspect and modify the way Markdown is converted to other formats like HTML.

under the hood, the markdown is parsed by the unified remark and rehype processors, which in turn under the hood manipulate the markdown + HTML as an AST, which gives a lot of flexibility on parsing and rendering markdown. The editor uses them as plugins, which allows me to pick the features and inject them into the editor, one such injectable feature is the custom-made "copy from anywhere & paste as markdown" feature.

Having the flexibility to create custom React Components for markdown is essential and with react-markdown, we can achieve this in just a few lines of code. Boosting performance, increasing link security, and having overall increased capabilities for our markdown data are what we achieve here. Aside from the improvements within our application, this component is super easy to use and taps us into the unifiedjs (giving us superpowers!).

The Markdown processor used unified assets.