Improve Syntax highlighting

[cafce25]

Expected Behavior

Syntax highlighting does a good job and highlights strings, variables, function/method calls,

Actual Behavior

Only a few keywords and strings are highlighted, the strings barely noticable.

Steps to Reproduce the Problem

1. Visit any reference / comparision page

Additional Info

There is a few things we can look into here:

1. Change the pygments color scheme we use so the few things that are highligted are clearly visible
2. Look into pygments settings if we can get more things highligted (different Lexer?)
3. Contribute to upstream pygments to get better highligting
4. Switch from pygments to something else entirely

[geekygirlsarah]

I think like you mentioned, some of it is we have code snippets and not full pieces of running code, so their highlighters might not fully know everything to highlight.

3/4 are outside of the scope of a ticket here. We can see if anyone wants to look into 1/2.

[Shreya-7]

@geekygirlsarah I wouldn't mind looking into 1/2!

[cafce25]

While you're at 1 maybe you can include a way the user can decide which colorscheme is used,
that way we don't have to decide (we can't anyways) what they can read.

[Shreya-7]

@cafce25 Hmm, that makes sense. I can start looking into the basic asks here, and when I'm done I can try to implement this new functionality..

Couple more questions about it though:

1. Are we talking about something like a dropdown on the reference page that the user can choose from?
2. Would we allow the user to choose a scheme that would be applied globally or on every reference page? Say, if they want to use scheme1 when reading exception handling in Java, but scheme2 when reading classes in Ada versus choosing scheme1 on the homepage that gets applied across the board.
3. Do we want to persist user preference so they do not have to select every time they visit the page? I don't think we support any customisations like that since we don't have sessions for a user. With a quick glance at the models we have, I can see we have something called SiteVisit but I'm not sure useful that would be.

[cafce25]

The main reason why I bring this up is because I don't think 1 can be solved by us alone.

1. Are we talking about something like a dropdown on the reference page that the user can choose from?

I'd say anything that you come up with is fine.

2. Would we allow the user to choose a scheme that would be applied globally or on every reference page?

I think supporting a single global setting is good enough.

3. Do we want to persist user preference so they do not have to select every time they visit the page? I don't think we support any customisations like that since we don't have sessions for a user. With a quick glance at the models we have, I can see we have something called SiteVisit but I'm not sure useful that would be.

Definitely persist it, but since it's a local change that we don't need to know of or care for imo just putting it in their local store or saving it in a cookie should be fine.

[Shreya-7]

Got it. I think I have all I need to get started.

[geekygirlsarah]

I'll still watch over #641 but I'm wondering if this feature is starting to get a bit wild and outside of scope of something that makes a lot of sense to maintain. Pygments is designed to highlight really large segments of code and we don't really use them here. And I don't know that adding in a ton of settings for something so simple really seems worth the effort.

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[geekygirlsarah]

I'm going to ask another friend or two what they think, so commenting to leave this open.

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[geekygirlsarah]

I'll comment to leave this open.

I closed the PR due to inactivity from @Shreya-7. I'm open to continuing discussions on this, but kind of thinking a solution might be dramatically more effort than is worth given how CT works.

[Shreya-7]

Not sure what's waiting on me here, I thought we were getting second opinions from other folks? Do let me know if that's not the case or if I'm missing something!

[geekygirlsarah]

There was more recent discussion on the PR than on here, and there were still open questions there that never got answered.

[Shreya-7]

Got it, if the functionality on the PR seems a bit overkill maybe we can just replace the current colour scheme with a better one and call it a day?

The way I think the scheme is implemented in CT is that the CSS file was manually generated locally, referenced in the HTML and added to the repo. We can do the same for the new one that I had selected. Does that sound good?

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[Chetan-Satpute]

I tried using PrismJs for syntax highlighting (client side).

Here are two sample pages

• Page 1
• Page 2

It requires us to serve two static files

• prism.js (~80K): including support for different programming languages.
• prism.css (~3K): colorscheme (List of themes).

changes in application to implement this method

• commit diff

prismjs.com

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[aedwardg]

Those prism examples above look like they work nicely with minimal changes