Low-level API

[be5invis]

Currently I am going to write something similar to Andres Löh’s lhs2TeX, which is a tool that analyzes your source code and, layout them in print-level outputs (using proportional fonts and tables to enforce alignment). The output may look like this:

However I found there is no way to extract low-level information about the tokens and ranges parsed by HLJS, which makes it impossible to do further layouting (i.e., analyzing alignments and form <table>s to place them).

[ghost]

Yes, I would definitely be a proponent of this. It would enable me to write a syntax highlighter for the terminal, which is virtually impossible to do so now (the only package I could find was cli-highlight but it does not support all languages). It would be far more elegant if there was a real API for this.

[fcarreiro]

I had exactly the same thoughts as you guys, for the same reason as @samvv. I was thinking of looking at the code to see what has to be changed to allow for a more low-level API.

Without yet having looked at it i think that, for terminal highlighting, it would probably be enough to have something like an array of (word, identifier); then identifier (variable, keyword, etc) can be mapped to colors with a theme. Later the HTML rendered would put HTML tags around those, and the terminal renderer would output a text decorated with the colors or chalk packages.

What do you think?

Do you think the three of us could make a team effort out of this?

I also wonder if this is something the community would accept to merge, since it's a change in the architecture, even if we make the default usage non-breaking and falling back to HTML.

[ghost]

@fcarreiro Looks like a good idea. Performance-wise it will be very fast. I'd be definitely willing to help, but I am already quite occupied with a lot of projects so I'm not sure I will be of much use. As for the merging, this would indeed mean severe changes that the maintainers might not be willing to accept.

[fcarreiro]

Thanks. Maybe we should ping @Sannis (the only maintainer I've seen around) to comment on this?

[joshgoebel]

Closing this as a duplicate of #1086 which has more discussion in the thread there.