🎨 Beautiful images of your code — from right inside your terminal.
carbon.now.sh by @dawn_labs is a wonderful tool that lets you generate beautiful images of your source code through an intuitive UI, while letting you customize aspects like fonts, themes, window controls and much more.
carbon-now-cli gives you the full power of Carbon — right at your fingertips, inside the terminal.
Generate beautiful images from a source file, or sections of a source file, by running a single command.
Want to customize everything before generating the image? Run it in ⚡️ interactive mode ⚡️. 😎
- 🖼 Downloads the real, high-quality image (no DOM screenshots)
- ✨ Detects file type automatically
- 🗂 Supports all file extensions supported by carbon.now.sh and more
- 🖱 Allows selective highlighting via
--startand--end - ⚡️ Interactive mode via
--interactive - 🎒 Presets: save and reuse your favorite settings
- 🐶 Displays image directly in supported terminals
- ⏱ Reports each step and therefore shortens the wait
- 👀 Saves to given location or only opens in browser for manual finish
- 🌈 Supports saving as
.pngor.svg— just like Carbon - 📏 Supports
2x,4xor1xresolutions — just like Carbon - ✅ Tested
- ⛏ Maintained
$ npm i -g carbon-now-cli
$ yarn global add carbon-now-cli
$ npx carbon-now-cli <file>
carbon-now-cli requires Node.js >=8.3.
$ carbon-now --help
Beautiful images of your code — from right inside your terminal.
Usage
$ carbon-now <file>
Options
-s, --start Starting line of <file>
-e, --end Ending line of <file>
-i, --interactive Interactive mode
-l, --location Image save location, default: cwd
-o, --open Open in browser instead of saving
-p, --preset Use a saved preset
-h, --headless Use only non-experimental Puppeteer features
Assuming you have a file unfold.js with this content
// Example from https://carbon.now.sh/
const unfold = (f, seed) => {
const go = (f, seed, acc) => {
const res = f(seed)
return res ? go(f, res[1], acc.concat([res[0]])) : acc
}
return go(f, seed, [])
};and you’d like to make a beautiful image out of it. You could approach this in several ways.
$ carbon-now unfold.js
Takes the entire source of unfold.js, uses Carbon’s default settings and saves as .png into your cwd.
Result:
Note: carbon-now will be smart enough to reuse your last used settings, instead of the default ones. 🤓
$ carbon-now unfold.js -i
Launches an interactive mode, prompting questions, allowing you to customize every aspect of Carbon, like syntax theme, font-family, padding, drop-shadow, etc.
Given this input…
…the result will look like so 😍:
If you’re not sure what each question, e.g. “Make squared image?”, refers to, just confirm by hitting Enter — it will default to a sensible, nice-looking thing.
If needed, you can always check the default settings.
$ carbon-now unfold.js -s 3 -e 6
Reads and creates an image based on lines 3 to 6, instead of the entire file. Will throw an error if -s > -e.
Selective mode can of course be combined with interactive mode, just with like any other option. 😊
Result:
Note: carbon-now will be smart enough to reuse your last used settings, instead of the default ones. 🤓
For demonstration purposes, here is an example using all options.
$ carbon-now unfold.js -s 3 -e 6 -l ~/Desktop -i
This saves a beautiful image of lines 3 to 6 to ~/Desktop, after accepting custom wishes via interactive mode.
If you’re not sure how exactly the image will turn out, you can always use -o or --open.
$ carbon-now unfold.js -s 3 -e 6 -i -o
This will open the image in the browser for final touches, instead of saving it immediately. 😌
This feature is currently only available through next. If you’d like access to it, update/install via:
npm i -g carbon-now-cli@next
The most requested feature after carbon-now-cli’s initial release has been the support for reusable settings, to not having to go through the entire process of answering all questions in interactive mode each time.
Presets will officially be included as of v1.1.0 of carbon-now-cli. 🎉
However you use the carbon-now command, a ~/.carbon-now.json file will be created for you. This is where all your presets and the settings of the last interactive run will live.
When running carbon-now with -i, you’ll be asked the following two questions last:
Answering with yes and naming the preset (in this case presentation) will result in the preset being saved to ~/.carbon-now.json. In this particular case, ~/.carbon-now.json will look like so:
{
"latest-preset": {
"t": "base16-light",
"bg": "none",
"wt": "none",
"wc": true,
"fm": "Inconsolata",
"fs": "18px",
"ln": true,
"ds": true,
"dsyoff": "3px",
"dsblur": "5px",
"wa": true,
"pv": "15px",
"ph": "15px",
"si": false,
"wm": false,
"es": "2x",
"type": "png"
},
"presentation": {
"t": "base16-light",
"bg": "none",
"wt": "none",
"wc": true,
"fm": "Inconsolata",
"fs": "18px",
"ln": true,
"ds": true,
"dsyoff": "3px",
"dsblur": "5px",
"wa": true,
"pv": "15px",
"ph": "15px",
"si": false,
"wm": false,
"es": "2x",
"type": "png"
}
}
latest-preset will be overwritten after each interactive run. presentation is meant to stay until you eventually decide to delete it manually.
Reusing presets is as easy and straight-forward as:
carbon-now unfold.js -p <name-of-preset>
If a given preset or ~/.carbon-now.json doesn’t exist, carbon-now-cli will fall back to the default settings.
Taken the presentation preset we have created above, this is all we have to do:
carbon-now unfold.js -p presentation
Result:
It just works! ™ 🎉
Any time you use -i, carbon-now-cli will automatically reuse those settings for its next run.
So you can carbon-now <file> -i and carbon-now <file> from there on — the output will always look as pretty as the one where you’ve used -i. 😊
MIT © Miloš Sutanovac