last modified 2015-02-20 20:07

In 2007, I wrote code to generate RTF that syntax highlights code, using Vim's syntax highlighting. I wrote about it in an earlier post or two. After that, I didn't think about it much, apart from fixing a couple things once in a while or running it once every year or so.

Earlier this week, David Golden tweeted a link to Joshua Timberman's blog, in which he was using a different tool, called highlight, for the same purpose: getting highlighted code into Keynote slides. He sounded pretty excited about it, so I thought maybe somebody would be excited about my program. (Over time, I've come to really appreciate having the same highlighting on my slides as in my editor!)

Rather than point at my GitHub repository in a tweet or something, I decided to make a proper CPAN release, which meant improving the code a fair bit and writing at least a very thin bit of documentation.

I've now released RTF::VimColor on the CPAN. You can install it and you end up with synrtf , a program that reads source code from a file and prints out RTF. You can (as Joshua points out) do something like:

synrtf lib/Awesome/Code.pm | pbcopy

...and then paste it into Keynote. Or whatever! Use it for printable code listings! Or do other cool stuff! Just have fun!