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  1. Stackups
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  4. Text Editor
  5. Prettier vs highlight.js

Prettier vs highlight.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

highlight.js
highlight.js
Stacks547
Followers31
Votes0
GitHub Stars24.7K
Forks3.7K
Prettier
Prettier
Stacks13.2K
Followers1.3K
Votes7
GitHub Stars51.1K
Forks4.6K

Prettier vs highlight.js: What are the differences?

Introduction

Prettier and highlight.js are both popular tools used in web development, but they serve different purposes. Prettier is a code formatter that helps to maintain consistent and standardized code formatting, while highlight.js is a syntax highlighter that adds color and emphasis to code snippets on a website. Below are the key differences between Prettier and highlight.js.

  1. Code Formatting vs Syntax Highlighting: The first major difference between Prettier and highlight.js is their primary purpose. Prettier focuses on code formatting, ensuring that the code is automatically formatted in a consistent and readable manner. On the other hand, highlight.js is used to highlight syntax within code snippets, providing visual and semantic emphasis to different elements of the code.

  2. Language Support: Prettier supports a wide range of languages, including popular ones like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and more. It follows specific rules and guidelines for formatting code in each supported language. On the contrary, highlight.js supports even more languages, providing syntax highlighting for a diverse set of programming languages and file formats.

  3. Usage: Prettier is typically used as a development tool, integrated into the development workflow. It is commonly integrated with code editors and build tooling, ensuring the code is automatically formatted during development. On the other hand, highlight.js is used in website development to highlight code snippets on web pages, enhancing the readability and visual appeal of the code.

  4. Configuration: Prettier has a fixed set of opinions and doesn't offer extensive configuration options. It follows its predefined rules and formatting styles, ensuring consistency across projects. In contrast, highlight.js offers more customization options, allowing developers to define their own styles and themes for syntax highlighting. It provides flexibility in adapting to the website's design and aesthetics.

  5. Performance: Prettier focuses on code formatting and aims for high-performance in automating the process. It uses efficient algorithms to quickly format code and minimize the impact on development speed. In contrast, highlight.js focuses on providing aesthetically pleasing syntax highlighting and may have a slightly higher performance overhead due to the additional rendering of colors and styles.

  6. Implementation: Prettier is typically implemented as a command-line tool or as a plugin within code editors. It can be seamlessly integrated into the development workflow, allowing automatic formatting on save or specific triggers. On the other hand, highlight.js is implemented as a JavaScript library that developers can include in their web pages. It provides APIs and functions to apply syntax highlighting to code snippets dynamically.

In summary, Prettier is primarily a code formatter that ensures code consistency and readability during development, while highlight.js is a syntax highlighter that adds visual emphasis to code snippets on websites through customizable styles and themes.

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Advice on highlight.js, Prettier

Alex
Alex

Software Engineer

Aug 7, 2020

Review

you don't actually have to choose between these tools as they have vastly different purposes. i think its more a matter of understanding how to use them.

while eslint and stylelint are used to notify you about code quality issues, to guide you to write better code, prettier automatically handles code formatting (without notifying me). nothing else.

prettier and eslint both officially discourage using the eslint-plugin-prettier way, as these tools actually do very different things. autofixing with linters on watch isnt a great idea either. auto-fixing should only be done intentionally. you're not alone though, as a lot of devs set this up wrong.

i encourage you to think about what problem you're trying to solve and configure accordingly.

for my teams i set it up like this:

  • eslint, stylelint, prettier locally installed for cli use and ide support
  • eslint config prettier (code formatting rules are not eslints business, so dont warn me about it)
  • vscode workspace config: format on save
  • separate npm scripts for linting, and formatting
  • precommit hooks (husky)

so you can easily integrate with gulp. its just js after all ;)

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

highlight.js
highlight.js
Prettier
Prettier

It works in the browser as well as on the server. It works with pretty much any markup, doesn’t depend on any framework, and has automatic language detection.

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary.

Import Highlight.js as a CommonJS-module; The default import imports all languages; Custom Initialization
An opinionated code formatter; Supports many languages; Integrates with most editors; Has few options; You press save and code is formatted; No need to discuss style in code review; Saves you time and energy
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.7K
GitHub Stars
51.1K
GitHub Forks
3.7K
GitHub Forks
4.6K
Stacks
547
Stacks
13.2K
Followers
31
Followers
1.3K
Votes
0
Votes
7
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 2
    Customizable
  • 1
    Open Source
  • 1
    Completely free
  • 1
    Runs offline
  • 1
    Follows the Ruby Style Guide by default
Integrations
AngularJS
AngularJS
Node.js
Node.js
JavaScript
JavaScript
GraphQL
GraphQL
JavaScript
JavaScript
TypeScript
TypeScript
Flow
Flow
Vue.js
Vue.js
AngularJS
AngularJS
markdown
markdown
YAML
YAML
Less
Less

What are some alternatives to highlight.js, Prettier?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Code Climate

Code Climate

After each Git push, Code Climate analyzes your code for complexity, duplication, and common smells to determine changes in quality and surface technical debt hotspots.

Codacy

Codacy

Codacy automates code reviews and monitors code quality on every commit and pull request on more than 40 programming languages reporting back the impact of every commit or PR, issues concerning code style, best practices and security.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Phabricator

Phabricator

Phabricator is a collection of open source web applications that help software companies build better software.

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