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Providing code snippets on your website or blog can be a great way to convey meaning for technical concepts.
Using the HTML `pre` tag can help provide structure to your listings, in terms of spacing and indentation, but highlighting keywords - as most people do in their code text editors - also vastly helps improve readability.
For example, consider the below JavaScript snippet.
class Greeter {
greet(name) {
console.log(`Hello, ${name}!`);
}
}
const greeter = new Greeter();
greeter.greet('Will');
The exact same listing is displayed below with some simple syntax highlighting. The structure and meaning of the code becomes much easier to understand.
class Greeter {
greet(name) {
console.log(`Hello, ${name}!`);
}
}
const greeter = new Greeter();
greeter.greet('Will');
If you build your website with GatsbyJS [1] and write your blog posts or pages in markdown format, then adding syntax highlighting is super easy.
PrismJS [2] is a well-established library for achieving syntax highlighting on any website. Luckily, there is also a Gatsby plugin [3] for Prism which makes it much easier to get started in Gatsby websites.
First of all, add the required dependencies to your project:
yarn add gatsby-transformer-remark gatsby-remark-prismjs prismjs
Next, add an entry to the `plugins` array in your `gatsby-config.js` file to use the plugin. For example, the below is what I use.
...
plugins: [
...
{
resolve: 'gatsby-transformer-remark',
options: {
plugins: [
{
resolve: 'gatsby-remark-prismjs',
options: {
classPrefix: 'language-',
showLineNumbers: true,
noInlineHighlight: false,
}
}
]
},
},
],
...
Finally, you'll need to choose a theme. There are a number of official ones available [4] from Prism. To enable one, simply add an entry to your `gatsby-browser.js` file. For example:
require('prismjs/themes/prism-solarizedlight.css');
That's it - now in your markdown you can add a block of code to syntax-highlight as follows:
<pre>
console.log('Hello, world');
</pre>
You can change the `javascript` part to a supported language [5] you are using, and Prism will syntax-highlight accordingly.
If you want to add extra features - such as line numbers - or if you run into issues, I recommend checking out the documentation for the plugin [6].