valadoc-org VS Highlight.js

My favorite thing about Vala personally is the wide range of native libraries you have access to because of its compatibility with GObjects.

There's a great documentation website that has everything located in one place also, which makes development a breeze: https://valadoc.org/

Meson is the preferred build system, and Valadoc.org is invaluable.

You can use guides written for C along with https://valadoc.org.

I'm not sure who needs to be contacted, but valadoc.org is down. I was unable to reach it in Firefox or Chrome. Who do I need to contact? I'm seeing that elementaryOS is hosting valadoc.org, is that still the case?

The official Vala documentation is valadoc.org. I found the ecosystem of libraries around the language yet immature: it's not easy to found information or examples (an often when you found something it's pretty old). There isn't a standardization of the documentation of the libraries. This fact doesn't help a newbie.

I believe Vala is the best choice since the syntax is so simple, and has amazing documentation here

For going further, a lot of the API references are friendlier now. I like Valadoc. PyGObject exists for Python. C and Rust don't seem to have a good centralized source, but the documentation is a lot better now a days.

Vala is not very widely used, but all applications in Elementary OS are written in Vala, and their Developer Docs will help you get started writing your first GTK4 application in Vala really quickly. From there on, you can use the excellent valadoc.org for API reference, or browse the source code of Elementary apps on Github.

I'm often using documentation from another language binding when developing with GTK. Most of the time the Vala documentation https://valadoc.org/, because the language was designed around GLib and GTK. In your case it's even closer, because Vala is a C# knockoff with a different backend. Should keep you clear from C verbosity.

Found a monumental commit 😌: https://github.com/vala-lang/valadoc-org/blob/3f434c8bcd76b711d0262284fadbdeeb47165e6a/README.md

> 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.