expressive-code

expressive-code

Contents

• What is this?
• When should I use this?
• Installation
• Usage example
• API
  • ExpressiveCode

What is this?

A framework-agnostic wrapper package that provides convenient access to the key packages of Expressive Code, an engine for presenting source code on the web.

Instead of having to install and manage multiple Expressive Code packages separately, this package includes both the core engine and all default plugins as dependencies and exports them.

Included packages:

• @expressive-code/core
• @expressive-code/plugin-frames
• @expressive-code/plugin-shiki
• @expressive-code/plugin-text-markers

When should I use this?

Using this package directly is only recommended for advanced use cases, e.g. to create integrations of Expressive Code into other tools and frameworks.

If you just want to render code blocks on your website, you should use one of the higher-level packages instead, e.g. astro-expressive-code or remark-expressive-code for code blocks in markdown / MDX documents.

Installation

npm install expressive-code

Usage example

import { ExpressiveCode, ExpressiveCodeConfig } from 'expressive-code'
import { toHtml } from 'hast-util-to-html'

const ec = new ExpressiveCode()

// Get base styles that should be included on the page
// (they are independent of the rendered code blocks)
const baseStyles = await ec.getBaseStyles()

// Render some example code to AST
const { renderedGroupAst, styles } = await ec.render({
  code: 'console.log("Hello world!")',
  language: 'js',
  meta: '',
})

// Convert the rendered AST to HTML
let htmlContent = toHtml(renderedGroupAst)

// Collect styles and add them before the HTML content
const stylesToPrepend: string[] = []
stylesToPrepend.push(baseStyles)
stylesToPrepend.push(...styles)
if (stylesToPrepend.length) {
  htmlContent = `<style>${[...stylesToPrepend].join('')}</style>${htmlContent}`
}

// Output HTML to the console
console.log(htmlContent)

API

ExpressiveCode

The main class of expressive-code. It extends the ExpressiveCodeEngine class and adds some configuration options.

In addition to the options provided by the core engine, the following options are available:

• shiki: boolean

  The Shiki plugin adds syntax highlighting to code blocks.

  This plugin is enabled by default. Set this to false to disable it.

• textMarkers: boolean

  The Text Markers plugin allows to highlight lines and inline ranges in code blocks in various styles (e.g. marked, inserted, deleted).

  This plugin is enabled by default. Set this to false to disable it.

• frames: PluginFramesOptions | boolean

  The Frames plugin adds an editor or terminal frame around code blocks, including an optional title displayed as a tab or window caption.

  This plugin is enabled by default. Set this to false to disable it.

  You can also configure the plugin by setting this to an options object.