Viewing Colored Source Code with Pygments

Setting up Pygments

Commands like cat and less are great for viewing the contents of a file, but when we’re looking at code, syntax coloring makes things easier to see.

The Pygments library for Python can scan code and produce colored output. When we install it globally, we get a pygmentize command to print a file to our screen with color.

Let’s install Pygments using the pip3 command:

pip3 install Pygments

Once installed, we use it to read a file. Let’s create the following Ruby file named person.rb in our current directory:

class Person
  attr_accessor :first_name, :last_name
  def initialize(first_name, last_name) 
    @first_name = first_name
    @last_name = last_name
  end
  
  def full_name
    "#{self.first_name} #{self.last_name}"
  end 
end

Using Pygments

Then, we use pygmentize to view the file in color.

pygmentize -g person.rb

Run the complete code on the terminal below for practice.

cat << "EOF" > person.rb
class Person
  attr_accessor :first_name, :last_name
  def initialize(first_name, last_name) 
    @first_name = first_name
    @last_name = last_name
  end
  
  def full_name
    "#{self.first_name} #{self.last_name}"
  end 
end
EOF
pygmentize -g person.rb