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Programming language: TypeScript
License: MIT License
Tags: Command Line Apps    
Latest version: v1.4.0

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README

[Carbon CLI](static/banner.png)

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

Build Status XO code style Featured in awesome-nodejs Twitter Follow Maintenance MIT license

Table of Contents

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 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 ⚡️. 😎

[Basic example](static/demo.gif)

Features

Installation

npm

$ npm i -g carbon-now-cli

yarn

$ yarn global add carbon-now-cli

npx

$ npx carbon-now-cli <file>

Requirements

Minimum Node.js version

Usage

$ carbon-now --help

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

Usage
  $ carbon-now <file>
  $ pbpaste | carbon-now
  $ carbon-now --from-clipboard

Options
  -s, --start          Starting line of <file>
  -e, --end            Ending line of <file>
  -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 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.

Basic

$ carbon-now unfold.js

Takes the entire source of unfold.js, uses Carbon’s default settings and saves as .png into your cwd.

Result:

[Basic example](static/example-1.png)

Note: carbon-now will be smart enough to reuse your last used settings, instead of the default ones. 🤓

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…

[Example 2, Input](static/example-2-1.png)

…the result will look like so 😍:

[Example 2, Output](static/example-2-2.png)

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 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:

[Example 3](static/example-3.png)

Note: carbon-now will be smart enough to reuse your last used settings, instead of the default ones. 🤓

Copying to clipboard

[Copying to Clipboard](static/clipboard-demo.gif)

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 flag is for.

$ 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 is required. You can install it via

sudo apt-get install xclip
Windows

NirCmd is required. It can be installed via

choco install nircmd

Also make sure the nircmd command is globally accessible/inside your Windows directory.

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 therefore also accepts input coming from stdin or the clipboard.

stdin
$ pbpaste | carbon-now
$ echo '<h1>Hi</h1>' | 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 to 6 to ~/Desktop/example-23.png, 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. 😌

Presets

About

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 are officially included as of v1.1.0 of carbon-now-cli. 🎉

Creating a preset

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:

[Presets 1](static/presets-1.png)

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.

Using a saved preset

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:

[Presets 1](static/presets-2.png)

Reusing the last used settings

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. 😊

Local configs

It is possible to use local configuration files via the --config flag.

This is convenient if you’re using carbon-now-cli via a script and would like to share presets among the users of your project.

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

Local configs differ from ~/.carbon-now.json in the sense that they behave in a read-only manner, hence:

  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


*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the carbon-now-cli README section above are relevant to that project's source code only.