I’m a terminal command line basher (see what I did there?). While I understand the appeal of IDEs, I tend to create from the command line. I use Sublime as a lightweight text editor, but for everything else, I like to tickle the keys. I started using computers before the GUI era, and it has stuck with me. It might also have something to do with the fact I took piano lessons for many years!
One trick I waited far too long to implement was to get a good syntax highlighter at the command line. It is relatively straight forward. First, I install the Python package pygments system-wide with pip.
sudo pip install pygments
Next, I create an alias in my home directories .bashrc file. I’ll add line numbers for good measure.
alias ccat='pygmentize -O style=monokai,linenos=1 -f terminal -g'
After doing this, I now have a colored cat command, or ccat. It can be used as follows, with pretty results.
$ ccat settings.py
0001: from django.conf import settings
0002:
0003: from .models import Settings
0004:
0005:
0006: def get_setting(key, default):
0007: """
0008: Returns a value for key from the Settings model.
0009: """
0010: setting = Settings.objects.get(key=key)
0011:
0012:
0013: def get_clear_cache():
0014: """
0015: Default to clearing the cache after each page edit.
0016: """
0017:
0018: return getattr(settings, "WP_CLEAR_CACHE", False)
Small things like this help make me a better developer. It makes source code in the terminal very clear, and pygments supports a vast array of languages for highlighting.