thlorenz / cardinal

Syntax highlights JavaScript code with ANSI colors to be printed to the terminal.

cardinal

car·di·nal (kärdn-l, kärdnl) - crested thick-billed North American finch having bright red plumage in the male.

Features

• highlights JavaScript code with ANSI colors to improve terminal output
• theming support, see custom color themes
• optionally print line numbers
• API and command line interface (cdl)
• .cardinalrc config to customize settings
• supports UNIX pipes

---

Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Installation
  • As library
  • As Commandline Tool
• Commandline
  • Highlight a file
  • As part of a UNIX pipe
  • Theme
• API
  • highlight(code[, opts])
  • highlightFileSync(fullPath[, opts])
  • highlightFile(fullPath[, opts], callback)
  • opts
• [Examples (browse)](#examples-[browse]https://githubcom/thlorenz/cardinal/tree/master/examples)

Installation

As library

npm install cardinal

As Commandline Tool

[sudo] npm install -g cardinal

Note:

When installed globally, cardinal exposes itself as the cdl command.

Commandline

Highlight a file

cdl <file.js> [options]

options:

• --nonum: turns off line number printing (relevant if it is turned on inside ~/.cardinalrc

As part of a UNIX pipe

cat file.js | grep console | cdl

Note:

Not all code lines may be parsable JavaScript. In these cases the line is printed to the terminal without highlighting it.

Theme

The default theme will be used for highlighting.

To use a different theme, include a .cardinalrc file in your HOME directory.

This is a JSON file of the following form:

{
  "theme": "hide-semicolons",
  "linenos": true|false
}

• theme can be the name of any of the built-in themes or the full path to a custom theme anywhere on your computer.
• linenos toggles line number printing

API

highlight(code[, opts])

• returns the highlighted version of the passed code ({String}) or throws an error if it was not able to parse it
• opts (see below)

highlightFileSync(fullPath[, opts])

• returns the highlighted version of the file whose fullPath ({String}) was passed or throws an error if it was not able to parse it
• opts (see below)

highlightFile(fullPath[, opts], callback)

• calls back with the highlighted version of the file whose fullPath ({String}) was passed or with an error if it was not able to parse it
• opts (see below)
• callback ({Function}) has the following signature: function (err, highlighted) { .. }

opts

opts is an {Object} with the following properties:

• theme {Object} is used to optionally override the theme used to highlight
• linenos {Boolean} if true line numbers are included in the highlighted code
• firstline {Integer} sets line number of the first line when line numbers are printed
• jsx {Boolean} if true JSX syntax is supported, otherwise cardinal will raise an error when encountering JSX (default: false)

Note The json option is obsoleted and not necessary anymore as cardinal properly understands both JSON and JavaScript.

Examples (browse)

• sample .cardinalrc
• highlighting a code snippet via highlight()
• file that highlights itself via highlightFile() including line numbers
• file that highlights itself hiding all semicolons via highlightFileSync()

cardinal's Issues

Problem targeting a custom theme

I'm trying to customize it, but when I simply add the theme option, it stops highlighting!

For example:

// works with default theme
cardinal.highlight(codeString,  {
    linenos: true
});

But:

// do not work!
// nothing gets lighlighted
cardinal.highlight(codeString,  {
    linenos: true,
    theme: 'default'
});

Am I doing something wrong?

My idea is to use it like this:

cardinal.highlight(codeString,  {
    linenos: true,
    theme: __dirname + '/sh-theme.js'
});

Should that work?
Also, it would be interesting if we could send the theme object itself, like this:

cardinal.highlight(codeString,  {
    linenos: true,
    theme: require('./sh-theme.js')
});

Docked

Hi, just pointing out that since I found cardinal pretty handy for prettifying JSON in some of my scripts but I didn't want to try to package my scripts with the dependency on node and cardinal, I threw this together:

https://github.com/giftig/docker-cardinal

If having a docker quickstart for cardinal is something that's of interest to you, I'd like to contribute it. It's pretty rough but does the job. I stuck an image in https://hub.docker.com/r/giftig/cardinal/

Can't colorize JavaScript with syntax errors.

I was trying to super colorize a console error stack trace code part of the message and run into cardinal which seemed great for colorizing valid JS, but fails if:

 Unable to perform highlight. The code contained syntax errors:

Kind of ironic. Too bad.

Related

• #1

Link Typo

Thanks for this repo man, just wanted to show ya a lil missing .

Cannot handle object spread syntax

I know that technically object spread is only a stage 2 proposal on the ECMAscript standard, but it would be lovely if cardinal could handle it :)

It doesn't have to highlight it, just not crash with an exception when it's encountered (Unexpected token ...)

https://github.com/sebmarkbage/ecmascript-rest-spread

Erroneous parse error

I'm getting a syntax error when I don't think I should.

$ node
> var cardinal = require('cardinal')

> cardinal.highlight("{name: 'lodash'}")
'\u001b[33m{\u001b[39m\u001b[37mname\u001b[39m\u001b[93m:\u001b[39m \u001b[92m\'lodash\'\u001b[39m\u001b[33m}\u001b[39m'

> cardinal.highlight("{name: 'lodash', version: '1.3.1'}")
        Error: Unable to perform highlight. The code contained syntax errors: Line 1: Unexpected token :
            at throwError (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:1156:21)
        at throwUnexpected (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:1213:9)
        at consumeSemicolon (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:1295:13)
        at parseStatement (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:2804:9)
        at ./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:3609:38
        at parseStatement (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:2794:27)
        at ./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:3609:38
        at parseSourceElement (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:3062:20)
        at parseStatementList (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:2051:25)
        at parseBlock (./node_modules/cardinal/node_modules/redeyed/node_modules/esprima/esprima.js:2066:17)

Am I doing something wrong?

Suppor ES6 syntax

Unfortunately cardinal does not seem to be able to recognise most of the ES6 syntax.

CoffeeScript support

I'd love to see coffeescript support for this. Any plans for this?

Support marking lines and positions

Supporting line markers and character positions would be greatly useful. We can use such functionality in tools to show script errors etc.

Support TypeScript and Flow

Highlighting TypeScript and Flow would be nice. Not sure how you can achieve both syntaxes.

Highlight a selected line

It would be neat if this library supported highlighting a specific line only, and fading others (like empty theme?) so that you could make one of the lines prominent.

Removes the shebang line

Hi,

Great project, works pretty robustly. I am using to output highlighted javascript or json file in the center of the terminal in center-code. I noticed that shebang line if it is the first one is handled, but it is removed from the output. Thus something like this

#!/usr/bin/env node

var foo = 42;

will be highlighted but simply as

var foo = 42;