Switching to Redcarpet
I’ve always hated the way Jekyll uses liquid tags to highlight code snippets. I found a way to do this, which until today, I never knew existed.
Redcarpet is the answer here. Here’s what I wanted to do:
```scss .element { color: $red; } ```
Basically like the way you do code snippets on Github. Now, you might be thinking, “Kramdown has Github-Flavored-Markdown support!” But, after trying to get it to work for an hour or so, I was left frustrated. The fenced code block was technically working, but no syntax highlighting.
So I changed a few lines of code:
# _config.yml
markdown: redcarpet
markdown_ext: markdown,mkdown,mkdn,mkd,md
redcarpet:
extensions: ["tables", "autolink", "strikethrough", "space_after_headers", "with_toc_data", "fenced_code_blocks", "no_intra_emphasis", "footnotes", "smart"]
Voilá! The fenced_code_blocks
extension is the important one here, but personally, footnotes
, and smart
are crucial extensions for me too.1
That’s it! With a few lines of code, I improved my whole writing experience ten fold.
Update on November 15, 2016: I’ve switched back to Kramdown because it was way easier and removed a dependency.
-
The
footnotes
extension lets me write these. And thesmart
extension frees me up from having to manually type the right quotes. If you don’t know what I mean by this, Jason Santa Maria wrote about it. ↩