When I’m preparing content for a presentation deck, I often find myself struggling to get code snippets from Sublime Text to Keynote. The code loses highlighting and indentation. After having this frustrating experience, I looked for and found a nice little command line tool called Highlight by Andre Simon that helps with the struggle.
Why Highlight?
Highlight is simple, cross-platform, and incredibly flexible. For me, I work on the command line a lot so having a tool that I can access immediately is great. The nice thing is that highlight has a GUI tool that contains a subset of the command line tool and a realtime preview. You can learn how to build the GUI in the installation instructions.
The plug-ins and themes provide flexibility to support specific file types and to tailor your output for a given presentation deck. Highlight ships with quite a few themes that you can find in the share directory after installation.
Get out your highlighters
The first thing you’ll need to do is install highlight. My preferred method for OS X is to use brew, which makes it super simple:
brew install highlight
For Windows, you can simply download the Windows installer and follow the instructions. Easy!
Highlight your first file
My primary workflow is sending a code file into highlight and piping the output to pbcopy to get it into the clipboard. From there, I can easily paste it into Keynote and do any necessary resizing to make it readable on screen.
highlight -O rtf file.js | pbcopy
This example is the simplest example of the command line options. Note that the rtf output format is required for pasting into Keynote. This preserves the formatting and coloring.
Aside from setting the output, Highlight has a lot of more available options, which you can find those in the manual. I would like to…highlight…a few of my favorites:
-kor--font– sets the font face-Kor--font-size– sets the font size-tor--tab– sets the tab length-sor--style– sets the theme
My usual command line looks something like this:
highlight -O rtf -s earendel -k 'Courier' -K 50 file.js | pbcopy
That line tells highlight to style the output according to the “earendel” theme, use the Courier font, and size the font to 50 points. The output looks like this once pasted inside of Keynote:
Awesome output for such a simple command line tool!
Go forth and highlight!
Highlight is straight-forward to install, easy to use, and ships with a great set of themes. Despite its simplicity, highlight is powerful and makes creating beautiful technical presentations a breeze. Try it out and see what you think!