Code highlighting for Keynote presentations

gistfile1.md

Step 0:

Get Homebrew installed on your mac if you don't already have it

Step 1:

Install highlight. "brew install highlight". (This brings down Lua and Boost as well)

Step 2:

Highlight your source. "highlight -O rtf myfile.php | pbcopy". This will highlight the source code in RTF format and copy the result of that operation to your Mac's clipboard.

Step 3:

Paste into your slide in Keynote. Keynote will create a new text box with your highlighted code. You can adjust the width as needed, and adjust the font size with cmd+ and cmd-

Perfect - thanks! (Google indexed within 6 hours too). fyi I had to 'brew update' to avoid boost SHA mismatch error.

Also: "pbpaste | highlight --syntax=js -O rtf | pbcopy" I'll have to set this up as an alias to quickly run a few things through the highlighter.

it's very useful. Thanks.

Great tool! Here's just a dump of the params I use, in case it helps/inspires anyone:

highlight -O rtf highlight.rb --line-numbers --font-size 24 --font Inconsolata --style solarized-dark -W -J 50 -j 3 --src-lang ruby | pbcopy

I noticed that you lose the background color of the theme from highlight, is there any way to keep that?

I use pygments instead of highlight, which is easy to install via python. With that in place you can use an Applescript like this: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/94222/how-to-get-automator-to-treat-text-as-rtf/94246#94246.

I have that in my Pages (could be Keynote) scripts folder and then I enabled the scripts menu. Now I just select the text I want to format and hit a menu item and it highlights it for me!

What do you do when you can't brew install to /usr/local/ (the default location in python) and you don't want to install something like anaconda?

edit - well fml didnt realize this required boost. there goes an hour.

does this work on mavericks?

Yes it works on mavericks too. Thank you for sharing.

If anyone needs it, here's the documentation for Highlight, http://www.andre-simon.de/doku/highlight/en/highlight.html

Very useful gist. Thanks for posting.

for slides black background preferred theme anotherdark. which font style cool guys recommend?

@snookca how do you add your filename in there?

Oh... very great!!
thank you.

Here's my version, using Pygments https://gist.github.com/simono/9379347

This is really useful gist!
Thank you very much for sharing/posting it.

Awesome!

@hadifarnoud this one works with the filename or clipboard. Put the code in your .bash_profile.

Following on from @snookca and @felixyz you can enter the syntax on the command line and either copy from the clipboard (light js) or pass a filename too (light js func.js).

function light() {
  if [ -z "$2" ]
    then src="pbpaste"
  else
    src="cat $2"
  fi
  $src | highlight -O rtf --syntax $1 --font Inconsolata --style solarized-dark --font-size 24 | pbcopy
}

For me it works when I copy & paste some code directly from Xcode to TextEdit.
Also it is possible to create a textfield in Pages or Keynote and paste the code in it.
Tested on Mac OS X 10.9.1 with Xcode 5.1, Keynote 6.2 and Pages 5.2.

If you want to use Alfred to format code from the clipboard (based on @mazuhl's comment above): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1806977/Highlight%20Code.alfredworkflow

In case it doesn't work: Make sure $PATH is set accordingly. Alfred apparently does not know about your $PATH, that's why the workflow starts with export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin. However, if highlight is on a different path, this has to be changed.

Here's how to set up a keyboard shortcut to highlight the current selection directly within Keynote: https://gist.github.com/lrytz/d82c1adf7337a4cecace

On mac, you can quickly preview a HTML version with the help of netcat:

(cat <source> | highlight --inline-css | nc -l 5555)& open http://localhost:5555

highlight: Could not read input file:

I've done this for years with pygmentize: pygmentize -f rtf <filename> | pbcopy does the trick, although some upthread commenters have fancier variations.

Thank you. This helped me to create my last presentation.

@aoberoi Did you figure out a solution to persist background color using highlight?

Thank you. This helped me to create my last presentation.

Anyone has ideas for ES6 support ?

Thanks for advice. Works perfect for my slides.

Thanks for the share!

I tried and succeeded in copy-pasting from PHPStorm and XCode aswell [ MacOS 10.11.3 ].
@freak4pc : works in Atom too with the copy-as-rtf package, which uses pygments under the hood.

It seems there is a Sublime package doing the same.

As far as I know, this is not working with Netbeans

Thanks，very helpful～

Amazing!

To format JSON with human readable spacing and breaklines (requires python 2.6+)

pbpaste | python -m json.tool | highlight --syntax=json -O rtf | pbcopy

Any suggestions about which highlight theme is better to use for good contrast on white slides?

@rafarocha I found moria, neon, vampire, and zenburn are good for themes with dark background.

This is a real gem! Thanks for sharing.

Tip: if you have some code on your clipboard and want it highlighted, enter: pbpaste | highlight -O rtf --syntax=groovy | pbcopy (replace syntax=groovy with your language of choice)

why are background color missed ?

this snippet is generate by this commmand

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
pbpaste | highlight -O rtf --syntax {query} --font-size 14 --font Inconsolata --style zellner --inline-css | pbcopy

Any solutions for highlighting jsx code?

The following works for VSCODE.. add the following in your keybindings.json

    {
      "command": "editor.action.clipboardCopyWithSyntaxHighlightingAction",
      "key": "shift+cmd+c"
    }

Now any bit of code you want to copy do a cmd + shift + c.
Paste this onto a text editor like TextEdit for mac. Now copy the same code from textEdit and paste onto keynote..

My solution is to use Vim with vim-polyglot installed for syntax highlight

1. Open the file with the code on Vim
2. Use vertical selection (Option+Command + Left Click) on Terminal to select the part of the code I want to put into Keynote.
3. Pasted the copied content into a page in Keynote, the content is already formatted
4. You can customize the formatting even further on Keynote

Notes:

• point 2 works on iTerm as well, but you have to enable the option to copy text with styles.
  Prefs > Advanced > Copy to pasteboard on selection includes color and font style.
• The background color of your terminal is also copied, use Keynote to remove the background color. see this image

I would like to reduce the inter-line spacing : can either highlight or pygmentize handle that?

It seems does not support js. :(

👍