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Pygments VS highlight.js

Compare Pygments VS highlight.js and see what are their differences

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Pygments logo Pygments

Generic syntax highlighter suitable for use in code hosting, forums, wikis or other applications...

highlight.js logo highlight.js

Highlight.js is a syntax highlighter written in JavaScript. It works in the browser as well as on the server.
  • Pygments Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-15
  • highlight.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-25

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.

highlight.js features and specs

  • Wide Language Support
    Highlight.js supports a comprehensive range of programming languages out of the box, making it versatile for various projects.
  • Automatic Language Detection
    It can automatically detect the programming language of a code block, reducing the setup time and effort for developers.
  • Customization
    Highlight.js offers numerous themes and customization options, allowing developers to easily tailor the syntax highlighting to match their application's aesthetic.
  • Lightweight and Fast
    The library is lightweight and performs efficiently, ensuring quick load times and a seamless user experience.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source project, Highlight.js benefits from community contributions and is free to use, modify, and distribute.

Possible disadvantages of highlight.js

  • Limited Dynamic Features
    Highlight.js is primarily used for static code block highlighting and lacks advanced features like real-time editing or complex code analysis.
  • Manual Updates
    New languages or updates may not be immediately available, requiring users to manually update the library or find alternatives for less common languages.
  • Performance Degradation on Large Files
    Highlight.js may experience performance issues when rendering very large code files, potentially slowing down page load times.
  • Dependency Management
    As with many JavaScript libraries, managing dependencies and ensuring compatibility with other libraries or frameworks can be challenging.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Pygments and highlight.js)

Pygments

highlight.js

Documentation
69 69%
Documentation
31% 31
App Reviews
20 20%
App Reviews
80% 80
Customer Feedback
23 23%
Customer Feedback
77% 77
Marketing Tools
14 14%
Marketing Tools
86% 86

User comments

Share your experience with using Pygments and highlight.js. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, highlight.js should be more popular than Pygments. It has been mentiond 55 times since March 2021. 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.

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 / about 1 year ago
  • Marcel the Shell
    I suspect Pygments will be to your liking. https://pygments.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years 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: over 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: over 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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highlight.js mentions (55)

  • A better pkg.go.dev
    Every time a request come in, we forward it to the pkg.go.dev server, then append the highlight.js script to the response before sending it back to the client. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Day 19: Highlight'em up! 🔖
    It supports 192 languages, just like a browser highlighter:. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • YouTube Embeds Are Bananas Heavy and It's Fixable
    Now we only need to force bloggers to stop using GitHub Gist embeds. Hugo (and probably other static site generators) has built-in support for code snippets with syntax highlighting, and more dynamic sites can rely on highlight.js which removes dependence on third-party services. It's just insane, using heavy iframes for small code snippets. https://gohugo.io/content-management/syntax-highlighting/... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Glimmer DSL for Web Ruby Integration with JavaScript Libraries
    Glimmer DSL for Web is a Ruby-in-the-Browser Web Frontend Framework that enables Rubyists to finally have Ruby productivity and happiness in the Frontend via a simpler, more intuitive, more straightforward, and more productive library than all JavaScript libraries like React, Angular, Ember, Vue, Svelte, etc.... Glimmer DSL for Web's Rails sample app "Sample Selector" has been upgraded with Code Syntax... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Code Syntax highlighting in Next Js
    Let's get started by installing the highlight js. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Pygments and highlight.js, you can also consider the following products

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

Shiki - A beautiful syntax highlighter based on TextMate grammar, accurate and powerful.

Context.io - Context.IO is a REST email API that makes it easy and fast to integrate your user's email data in your application

Re-Highlight - Re-Highlight is a powerful text syntax highlighting library.

code-prettify - Code Prettify is an embeddable script that makes source-code snippets in HTML prettier.

Speed-highlight JS - A lightweight syntax highlighter written in JavaScript.

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