tartrazine/README.md

# TARTRAZINE

[![Tests](https://github.com/ralsina/tartrazine/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/ralsina/tartrazine/actions/workflows/ci.yml)
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Tartrazine is a library to syntax-highlight code. It is
a port of [Pygments](https://pygments.org/) to
[Crystal](https://crystal-lang.org/).

It also provides a CLI tool which can be used to highlight many things in many styles.

Currently Tartrazine supports 247 languages and has 331 themes (63 from Chroma,
the rest are base16 themes via [Sixteen](https://github.com/ralsina/sixteen)

## Installation

If you are using Arch: Use yay or your favourite AUR helper, package name is `tartrazine`.

From prebuilt binaries:

Each release provides statically-linked binaries that should
work on any Linux. Get them from the [releases page](https://github.com/ralsina/tartrazine/releases)
and put them in your PATH.

To build from source:

1. Clone this repo
2. Run `make` to build the `tartrazine` binary
3. Copy the binary somewhere in your PATH.

## Usage as a CLI tool

Show a syntax highlighted version of a C source file in your terminal:

```shell
tartrazine whatever.c -l c -t catppuccin-macchiato --line-numbers -f terminal
```

Generate a standalone HTML file from a C source file with the syntax highlighted:

```shell
$ tartrazine whatever.c -t catppuccin-macchiato --line-numbers \
  --standalone -f html -o whatever.html
```

## Usage as a Library

This works:

```crystal
require "tartrazine"

lexer = Tartrazine.lexer("crystal")
theme = Tartrazine.theme("catppuccin-macchiato")
formatter = Tartrazine::Html.new
formatter.theme = theme
puts formatter.format(File.read(ARGV[0]), lexer)
```

## Contributing

1. Fork it (<https://github.com/ralsina/tartrazine/fork>)
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`)
3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am 'Add some feature'`)
4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`)
5. Create a new Pull Request

## Contributors

- [Roberto Alsina](https://github.com/ralsina) - creator and maintainer

## A port of what, and why "kind of"

Pygments is a staple of the Python ecosystem, and it's great.
It lets you highlight code in many languages, and it has many
themes. Chroma is "Pygments for Go", it's actually a port of
Pygments to Go, and it's great too.

I wanted that in Crystal, so I started this project. But I did
not read much of the Pygments code. Or much of Chroma's.

Chroma has taken most of the Pygments lexers and turned them into
XML descriptions. What I did was take those XML files from Chroma
and a pile of test cases from Pygments, and I slapped them together
until the tests passed and my code produced the same output as
Chroma. Think of it as [*extreme TDD*](https://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/tartrazine-reimplementing-pygments.html)

Currently the pass rate for tests in the supported languages
is `96.8%`, which is *not bad for a couple days hacking*.

This only covers the RegexLexers, which are the most common ones,
but it means the supported languages are a subset of Chroma's, which
is a subset of Pygments' and DelegatingLexers (useful for things like template languages)

Then performance was bad, so I hacked and hacked and made it significantly
[faster than chroma](https://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/a-tale-of-optimization.html)
which is fun.