{"id":118639,"date":"2019-02-08T11:24:56","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T11:24:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/livablesoftware.com\/?p=118639"},"modified":"2019-02-08T14:15:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-08T14:15:24","slug":"tools-share-beautiful-code-snippets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/livablesoftware.com\/tools-share-beautiful-code-snippets\/","title":{"rendered":"5+ great tools to share beautiful code snippets"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you write about programming topics (if not, start now, writing makes you a better programmer<\/a>), you often need to include code snippets in your posts. Let’s review what are the best tools for creating and sharing your own source code snippets online. We’ll use this simple PHP code excerpt<\/a> as an example in the rest of the post.<\/p>\n

Let’s see what are the best alternatives to share a code excerpt online. <\/p>\n

The simplest choice: Code as text<\/h2>\n

The simplest solution is to just copy and paste the code in your (WordPress) post editor surrounded by a pair of <code><\/code> HTML tags.<\/p>\n

The advantage is that this way the code stays within your site,\u00a0it can be indexed together with the post and you can easily modify it at any time. The main con is that the visualization of the code is rather ugly and that there is no easy way to share the code itself separately from the post.<\/p>\n

Visualization can be improved by using a third-party plugin. In this blog, I use WP-syntax<\/a> (rather old but still working). It provides clean syntax highlighting using\u00a0GeSHi<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 supporting a wide range of popular\u00a0languages.<\/p>\n

An example of PHP code directly embedded in this post<\/p>\n

\t\t$day_parsed=date_parse($today->format(\"Ymd\"));\r\n\r\n\t\t$args = array(\r\n\t\t\t'post_type' => 'post',\r\n\t\t\t'post_status' => 'any', \/\/ we also want the drafts\r\n\t\t\t'nopaging'=>true,\r\n\t\t\t'date_query' => array(\r\n\t\t\t\t'relation' => 'OR',\r\n\t\t\t\tarray(    \/\/ returns posts created today\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'year'  => $day_parsed['year'],\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'month' => $day_parsed['month'],\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'day'   => $day_parsed['day'],\r\n\t\t\t\t),\r\n\t\t\t\tarray(    \/\/ returns posts modified today\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'column' => 'post_modified',\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'year'  => $day_parsed['year'],\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'month' => $day_parsed['month'],\r\n\t\t\t\t\t'day'   => $day_parsed['day'],\r\n\t\t\t\t),\r\n\t\t\t)\r\n\t\t);\r\n\r\n\t\t$query_day_posts = new WP_Query( $args );\r\n\r\n\t\t$posts=$query_day_posts->get_posts();\r\n<\/pre>\n
Nothing really spectacular but if you just have something small to show and don’t need to reuse it in other contexts, this works well enough.<\/p>\n
The obvious choice: Gists<\/h2>\n
Gists<\/a> are GitHub’s solution for sharing your code online. Every gist is a Git repository and therefore they can be forked and cloned as any other GitHub project<\/a>. If your software project is already hosted on GitHub, Gists are a natural choice. But you can use Gist even if your project is hosted elsewhere.<\/p>\n
See our PHP sample code as a Gist<\/p>\n