Introduction

This is a hexo tag plugin which allows you to use vim syntax highlight to highlight code inside markdown.

Why?

Hexo is a static blogging system written in Node.js, it uses highlight.js by default to render code.

However, lots of languages are not supported by highlight.js, but always supported by vim with proper plugins. Moreover, vim usually supports more features than highlight.js, even for common languages. See the demo below (left: vimhighlight; right: highlight.js).

From the image above, we see that highlight.js cannot recognize C++ keywords "struct", "static"; it also fails to recognize STL functions "forward" and "get". All of these can be handled correctly by vim.

See this page for more samples. Note that the actual appearance depends on how you config your vim.

Installation

You need to have vim properly installed and configured, since this program will directly run vim.

To install, run the following command in the root directory of hexo:

npm install hexo-tag-vimhighlight --save

Usage

Specify the code filetype, and whether to show line number, in the common format of tag plugins:

{% vimhl cpp true %}
template <unsigned K, class RET, class F, class Tup>
struct Expander {
  template <class... Ts>
  static RET expand(F&& func, Tup&& t, Ts && ... args) {
    return Expander<K - 1, RET, F, Tup>::expand (
        forward<F>(func),
        forward<Tup>(t),
        get<K - 1>(forward<Tup>(t)),
        forward<Ts>(args)...
    );}
};
{% endvimhl %}

By default, line number will not be displayed, you can use {% vimhl cpp %} for short.

Speed

This plugin calls vim to highlight code, so site-generation may be slow sometimes. The following mechanism are used to speed up rendering:

• The highlighted code will be cached in your_hexo_root/cache/vimHighlight so that only the first-time rendering will execute vim. Note that this implies you'll need to remove the cache folder manually if you changed vim colorscheme.

To further speed up the first-time rendering:

• This plugin uses async hexo tag. This means the vimhl tags between different posts will render concurrently.
• This hexo patch further enables concurrent rendering of tags within one post. If you have a single post with many vimhl tags, this patch can improve the first-time rendering.