prism-react-renderer VS Highlight.js

Both frameworks also support code blocks with syntax highlighting. Docusaurus uses prism-react-renderer for theming, while Starlight uses an Astro package called expressive-code to control customizations.

In my previous blog post on Code Reading, I read the codebase of Docusaurus to research how the project implements Syntax Highlighting for fenced code blocks. My research taught me that Docusaurus actually uses Prism-React-Renderer, a third-party library, to provide Syntax Highlighting. This knowledge was useful because I wanted to add syntax highlighting to ctil, my Markdown-to-HTML converter, but didn't want to implement the feature from scratch. Although I can't use Prism React Renderer in my own project, researching Docusaurus gave me the idea to find a Open Source library I could use.

For non-live codeBlock, you may want to render it by prism-react-renderer which is working also under the LiveEditor. I'm not sure what is the best way to share the style and theme between them but do so anyhow.

If you already haven’t integrated MDX into your project (you should because MDX is awesome), here’s the official guide on Gatsby's documentation to add it to your project. However, if you are already using Markdown Remark in your project, consider Migrating to MDX. In this post, we will integrate PrismJS syntax highlighting with MDX using prism-react-renderer. Also, we are going to add line numbers to code blocks. This is what we are aiming for:

Syntax Highlighting - Nextra comes with in-built syntax highlighting. However, when I created my site the syntax highlighting feature doesn’t seem to be working. So, I ended up creating my own syntax-highlighting component with prism-react-renderer.

If you have a Nextjs blog (or any React Framework blog) and want to create beautiful code blocks out of your MDX posts, then this post will show you how to do that using prism-react-renderer.

To fix it, I just went to this repo, specifically to prism-react-renderer/themes/ and checked the available themes I could use, and found out that the Visual Studio themes looked the best for my purpose.

From memory you need to target the `pre` block so you can apply the styles/theme to them. I uses prism-react-renderer.

Integrating syntax highlighting in Gatsby is solvable with solutions like gatsby-remark-prismjs or prism-react-renderer. When creating the code block in Markdown you specify the desired language (e.g. js or css) after the opening three backticks. It's a nice touch to display the specified language also in the code block itself, like I do it on my blog here:

In this very short quick tip you'll learn how to set up code blocks in MDX and Gatsby that support line numbers and code highlighting using the code renderer prism-react-renderer. A preview can be found on CodeSandbox.

> 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.