Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ShowdownJS VS Pygments

Compare ShowdownJS VS Pygments and see what are their differences

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ShowdownJS logo ShowdownJS

A Markdown to HTML converter written in JavaScript

Pygments logo Pygments

Generic syntax highlighter suitable for use in code hosting, forums, wikis or other applications...
  • ShowdownJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04
  • Pygments Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-15

ShowdownJS features and specs

  • Open Source
    ShowdownJS is open source and freely available under the MIT license, allowing for modification and distribution.
  • Wide Compatibility
    It can be used in both the browser and server-side environments, making it versatile for various projects.
  • Active Community
    The project has an active community and regular updates, which contribute to stability and ongoing support.
  • Extensive Documentation
    ShowdownJS provides comprehensive documentation, making it easier for developers to understand and implement.
  • Customizable
    It offers a wide range of extensions and options, allowing users to customize the behavior to suit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of ShowdownJS

  • Performance
    For very large documents, performance may not be as high compared to some other specialized Markdown parsers.
  • Learning Curve
    Although documentation is available, new users might need some time to fully understand how to leverage all features.
  • Dependency Management
    In projects where minimizing dependencies is important, adding another library might be a concern.
  • Feature Parity
    While ShowdownJS supports many Markdown features, some advanced or niche features might not be covered.

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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SEO
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Customer Feedback
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User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Pygments might be a bit more popular than ShowdownJS. We know about 10 links to it since March 2021 and only 9 links to ShowdownJS. 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.

ShowdownJS mentions (9)

  • How do I display a markdown table on a website with go backend?
    So you're going to need a Markdown parser that produces HTML. But there's a question of where is the data coming from and where you you want to process it? If it's going to be all on the frontend like a text editor, use a JS library for it (a quick google search produces ShowdownJS). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Docusaurus first impression and stealing like an open sourcer
    Previously, I was required to implement the markdown support manually which meant that the use of public libraries was prohibited. My tool could only support limited styling elements such as header1, header2, links, bold and italics, but now I can finally let my tool have a full markdown support by using Showdown. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • I made a full-stack portfolio site using Next.js and Tailwind!
    The first two ages are very heavy on content so I decided to use markdown and tailwind’s typography plugin for styling. I also used showdown to fetch the markdown and turn it into HTML. The code for the above can be found on the site’s GitHub repository. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Working on a no-code data notebook. You can quickly pull data from platforms like Stripe and do complex analysis without writing SQL, all within a Notion-style interface. Thoughts?
    I'm using https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown for the core rendering-markdown functionality, with a bunch of additional listeners etc on top of it to fit it into the notion-style UX! Hope that helps :). Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Markdown-Tag: Add Markdown to any HTML using a <md> tag
    It looks like it uses showdown as the engine. Source: about 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 ShowdownJS and Pygments, you can also consider the following products

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

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