🎨 Beautiful images of your code — from right inside your terminal.

Table of Contents

• Description
• Features
• Installation
• Usage
• Examples
• Presets
• License

Description

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

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 ⚡️. 😎

Features

• 🖼 Downloads the real, high-quality image (no DOM screenshots)
• ✨ Detects file type automatically
• 🗂 Supports all file extensions supported by carbon.now.sh and more
• ⚡️ Interactive mode via

  --interactive

• 🎒 Presets: save and reuse your favorite settings
• 🖱 Selective highlighting via

  --start

  and

  --end

• 📎 Copies image to clipboard via

  --copy

  (cross-OS 😱)
• 📚 Accepts file,

  stdin

  or clipboard content as input
• 🐶 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

  .png

  or

  .svg

  — just like Carbon
• 📏 Supports

  2x

  ,

  4x

  or

  1x

  resolutions — just like Carbon
• ✅ Tested
• ⛏ Maintained

Installation

npm

$ npm i -g carbon-now-cli

yarn

$ yarn global add carbon-now-cli

npx

$ npx carbon-now-cli 

Requirements

Usage

$ carbon-now --help

Beautiful images of your code — from right inside your terminal.
Usage
  $ carbon-now 
  $ pbpaste | carbon-now
  $ carbon-now --from-clipboard
Options
  -s, --start          Starting line of 
  -e, --end            Ending line of 
  -i, --interactive    Interactive mode
  -l, --location       Image save location, default: cwd
  -t, --target         Image name, default: original-hash.{png|svg}
  -o, --open           Open in browser instead of saving
  -c, --copy           Copy image to clipboard
  -p, --preset         Use a saved preset
  -h, --headless       Use only non-experimental Puppeteer features
  --config             Use a different, local config (read-only)
  --from-clipboard     Read input from clipboard instead of file
Examples
  See: https://github.com/mixn/carbon-now-cli#examples

Examples

Assuming you have a file

unfold.js

// 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.

Basic

$ carbon-now unfold.js

Takes the entire source of

unfold.js

.png

cwd

Result:

Note:

carbon-now

Fully customized

$ 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.

Selective

$ carbon-now unfold.js -s 3 -e 6

Reads and creates an image based on lines

3

6

-s

-e

Selective mode can of course be combined with interactive mode, just with like any other option. 😊

Result:

Note:

carbon-now

Copying to clipboard

It is sometimes desired to just put the image in the clipboard, so that it can be instantly pasted into other apps (like Keynote 💻 or Twitter 🐦). This is what the

--copy

-c

$ carbon-now unfold.js -c

will copy the image to clipboard instead of downloading it to a given directory.

Please be aware that this requires some binaries to be present on certain OS.

Linux

xclip

sudo apt-get install xclip

Windows

NirCmd

choco install nircmd

Also make sure the

nircmd

Input Sources

You’ll sometimes find yourself in a situation where you’d like to create an image based on a piece of code, but don’t want to be creating a file for it first.

In addition to files,

carbon-now-cli

stdin

stdin

$ pbpaste | carbon-now
$ echo '
Hi
' | carbon-now

Clipboard

$ carbon-now --from-clipboard

Full Example

For demonstration purposes, here is an example using all options.

$ carbon-now unfold.js -s 3 -e 6 -l ~/Desktop -t example-23 -i

This saves a beautiful image of lines

3

6

~/Desktop/example-23.png

If you’re not sure how exactly the image will turn out, you can always use

-o

--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. 😌

Presets

About

The most requested feature after

carbon-now-cli

Presets are officially included as of

v1.1.0

carbon-now-cli

Creating a preset

However you use the

carbon-now

~/.carbon-now.json

When running

carbon-now

-i

Answering with yes and naming the preset (in this case

presentation

~/.carbon-now.json

~/.carbon-now.json

{
  "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

presentation

Using a saved preset

Reusing presets is as easy and straight-forward as:

carbon-now unfold.js -p 

If a given preset or

~/.carbon-now.json

carbon-now-cli

Taken the

presentation

carbon-now unfold.js -p presentation

Result:

Reusing the last used settings

It just works! ™ 🎉

Any time you use

-i

carbon-now-cli

So you can

carbon-now  -i

carbon-now 

-i

Local configs

It is possible to use local configuration files via the

--config

This is convenient if you’re using

carbon-now-cli

carbon-now unfold.js --config local-config.json -p dark

Local configs differ from

~/.carbon-now.json

1. local-config.json

   won’t be created if it doesn’t exist

2. latest-preset

   will not be written to

   local-config.json

License

MIT © Miloš Sutanovac