prettyprint

Syntax highlighting library with batteries included.

⚠️ For new projects, you might want to use bat instead, which can be used as a library now. prettyprint is in maintenance mode, which means it will not see any major updates anymore, but pull requests will still be reviewed and dependencies will be kept up-to-date for the time being. You might want to consider migrating away eventually, though.

Quick start

The above output was created with the following code:

let printer = PrettyPrinter::default()
    .language("rust")
    .build()?;

printer.file("fixtures/fib.rs")?;

Note that prettyprint is a builder and can be customized. For example, if you don't like the grid or the header, you can disable those:

let printer = PrettyPrinter::default()
    .header(false)
    .grid(false)
    .language("ruby")
    .build()?;

let example = r#"
def fib(n)        
    return 1 if n <= 1
    fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
end
"#;
printer.string_with_header(example, "fib.rb")?;

"What!? It can also print strings, Matthias? That's insane."
It's true. You're welcome.

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

prettyprint = "*"

But why?

syntect is a great package for highlighting text.
When writing a command-line tool that prints text however, you might be looking for some additional functionality.

• Line numbers
• More built-in color-themes
• Automatic pagination
• Proper terminal handling
• Showing non-printable characters
• File headers
• Windows support

prettyprint offers all of this in one crate (thanks to bat).

Known limitations

• Doesn't run on no-std targets. I don't plan to support those.

Credits

prettyprint is simply a fork of bat, with some functionality stripped out and bundled up as a library. I built it, because I needed it for cargo-inspect. All credits go to the original authors.