Find a good sourcecode viewer

[valberg]

Djangit needs a good sourcecode viewer that has highlighting and linenumbers.

[valberg]

We can just have a template tag that uses pygments to do the highlighting and does something to add linenumbers.

[halfd]

Should it be frontend or backend or a combination?

[benjaoming]

You could go for server-side where the highlighting is generated and cached upon the first request.

Problem: When to clean up the cache.

If you don't do caching, then server-side generation seems futile, since the client has the advantage of being much more versatile and flexible to suit user needs.

[valberg]

@halfd Good question! As I see it both have pros and cons:

Frontend:

• Pros:
  • No strain on the server.
• Cons:
  • Dependency on a javascript library (which in my oppinion is cumbersome to maintain).

Backend:

• Pros:
  • We can write it as a template tag! Yay for re-usability!
• Cons:
  • The server has to do work.

@benjaoming Doing caching on the highlighting might be a good idea. But I can foresee that it becomes quite a cache. You would have to cache every blob and diff. But maybe that's not so bad?

[benjaoming]

Holistically, if you make the same expensive computation twice, it's a bad idea... so caching stuff like that is a really good thing. However, you can use the django cache proxy functions which allows people to have various cache backends.

[valberg]

I'm beginning to think that doing the highlighting on the frontend is a better solution.

Just found this:
https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js

[benjaoming]

Cool, do you know what the numbers in the parathesis on this page mean?
http://softwaremaniacs.org/media/soft/highlight/test.html

On 24 October 2013 20:05, valberg notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm beginning to think that doing the highlighting on the frontend is a
better solution.

Just found this:
https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/2#issuecomment-27015565
.

[halfd]

Here is some reading:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/160694/syntax-highlighting-code-with-javascript

http://craig.is/making/rainbows

http://prismjs.com/

http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/