react-live VS prism-react-renderer

We depend on react-live for preview and editor.

I've been using react-live within an MDX-based documentation site for a design system I'm working on and it's quite hefty! Came across Jarle just recently by @monasticpanic which is much lighter alternative. If you have more examples of such libraries then please share!

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.