Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Markdown-it VS Pygments

Compare Markdown-it VS Pygments and see what are their differences

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Markdown-it logo Markdown-it

High-speed Markdown parser with 100% CommonMark support, extensions & syntax plugins.

Pygments logo Pygments

Generic syntax highlighter suitable for use in code hosting, forums, wikis or other applications...
  • Markdown-it Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-07-21
  • Pygments Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-15

Markdown-it features and specs

  • High Performance
    Markdown-it is designed for fast processing, making it suitable for applications where performance is crucial.
  • Extensibility
    Markdown-it offers a plugin system that allows developers to extend its core functionality with custom rules and plugins.
  • CommonMark Support
    Markdown-it fully supports the CommonMark specification, ensuring consistent rendering across different platforms.
  • Full-featured
    It includes a lot of built-in features like support for tables, footnotes, and more advanced Markdown formatting options.
  • Easy to Customize
    With a wide range of configurations, developers can easily customize the parser to fit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Markdown-it

  • Size
    Being feature-rich and extensible may result in a larger library size, which might not be ideal for all projects, especially those with strict size limitations.
  • Complexity
    For users who need a simple markdown parser, Markdown-it’s extensive features and configuration options might be overwhelming.
  • Learning Curve
    Utilizing its full potential requires learning and understanding its plugin architecture and customization options, which could be challenging for beginners.
  • External Dependencies
    Relying on plugins may introduce external dependencies that need to be managed and maintained.

Pygments features and specs

  • Wide Language Support
    Pygments supports a broad range of programming languages and file formats, making it highly versatile for developers working in diverse environments.
  • High-Quality Output
    The library produces highly readable and aesthetically pleasing highlighted code, which is crucial for documentation and presentation.
  • Easy Integration
    Pygments is designed to integrate easily with a variety of web frameworks, content management systems, and text editors.
  • Customization Options
    Users can customize styles, themes, and output formats to meet specific needs, providing flexibility for different aesthetic requirements.
  • Active Community
    A strong, active community contributes to its continuous development and improvement, ensuring it stays updated with the latest languages and features.

Possible disadvantages of Pygments

  • Performance Overhead
    For large codebases or high-frequency requests, using Pygments can introduce performance overhead, potentially slowing down applications.
  • Dependency Management
    As with any library, integrating Pygments means managing its dependencies and ensuring compatibility with other project components.
  • Complexity in Advanced Use
    While basic usage is straightforward, more advanced features and customizations can introduce complexity, requiring a deeper understanding of the library.
  • Limited Built-In Features
    Pygments primarily focuses on syntax highlighting, so additional functionality (like code execution or detailed analysis) has to be handled by other tools or custom development.

Category Popularity

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Competitive Intelligence
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Documentation
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100% 100
SEO
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0% 0
Customer Feedback
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User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Pygments might be a bit more popular than Markdown-it. We know about 10 links to it since March 2021 and only 8 links to Markdown-it. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Markdown-it mentions (8)

  • Building PicoSSG: 'Just Enough Code'
    ADR-003 documented the choice of markdown-it over alternatives like marked, based on careful evaluation of edge cases and built-in features like URL linking. - Source: dev.to / 23 days ago
  • 6 free Markdown (.md) WYSIWYG desktop Editors – Part1
    [5] markdown-it demo Https://markdown-it.github.io/. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Rendering Markdown with Enhance
    Enhance does not natively support rendering markdown into HTML, which is out of scope for the project. Instead, we rely on markdown-it, an excellent JavaScript markdown parser that is endlessly configurable with plugins. As we use markdown in many different projects, we’ve created a node module called, Arcdown, which packages together our preferred conventions for parsing markdown files. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • I struggled to get markdown highlighting to work: Here’s the working code snippet 🚀
    It looks like this is TypeScript using markdown-it? Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Adding Markdown Support to a Static Site Generator
    For my own static site generator, Jellybean, one feature of Docusaurus that I wanted to implement was full markdown support. This is because my static site generator previously only had partial markdown support, which is not very user-friendly. Thankfully, there are a some great open-source libraries which can provide full markdown support and I decided to use markdown-it for my project. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
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Pygments mentions (10)

  • Ask HN: Printing Code to Paper?
    Some starter ideas[0] beyond spacing/line numbers. BNF format is used to describe a programming language. treesitter as a text editor plug in makes use of a language BNF description to be able to know how to parse & format a given lanuage in a text editor (aka pygments[1], gnu source code hightlights, [2] neovim with treesitter[3]). Aka searching google "treesitter work with microsoft notepade" --- [0] :... - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Marcel the Shell
    I suspect Pygments will be to your liking. https://pygments.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Blog in django
    It's not clear exactly what you want, but if you mean syntax highlighting, you could use pygments https://pygments.org/. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • I'm looking for a way to display live changes to a text file with Python
    Https://pygments.org/ - never tried it though. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText - a tale of docs-as-code
    Sphinx is incredibly powerful and can offer a table of contents, automatic links for functions, automatic code highlighting using Pygments, and other capabilities using built-in or third-party extensions. If you'd like to use (a flavor of) Markdown with Sphinx, you can do so using MyST-parser - a Sphinx and Docutils extension to parse MyST. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Markdown-it and Pygments, you can also consider the following products

ShowdownJS - A Markdown to HTML converter written in JavaScript

prism.js - Prism is a lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind.

Marked.js - A full-featured markdown parser and compiler, written in JavaScript. Built for speed.

Asciidoctor - In the spirit of free software, everyone is encouraged to help improve this project.

Snarkdown - The super fast, 1kb Markdown parser in JavaScript

mdbook - Gitbook alternative in Rust