shiki
v4.0.2 MITA beautiful Syntax Highlighter.
shiki Download Trends
About shiki
Shiki is a high-performance syntax highlighter designed for rendering code snippets beautifully across various platforms. It addresses the common need for accurate and aesthetically pleasing code presentation in documentation, blogs, and developer tools, solving the problem of static, unstyled code blocks by injecting rich styling based on TextMate grammars.
Its core philosophy revolves around speed and accuracy, leveraging a Rust-based highlighter internally for fast parsing and rendering. Shiki is primarily built for developers and designers who require precise syntax highlighting conforming to popular TextMate grammars, ensuring compatibility with existing tooling and configurations.
The package offers a programmatic API for integrating syntax highlighting directly into your JavaScript or TypeScript applications. Key functions like `getHighlighter` allow you to load themes and grammars, enabling dynamic highlighting of code strings. It also provides utilities for working with ASTs, offering fine-grained control over the highlighting process.
Shiki excels in integration within modern frontend frameworks and static site generators. It's commonly used in environments like Next.js, Vite, and Astro, and can be integrated into tools that process Markdown or other text formats, often via plugins that leverage its core highlighting engine.
With a substantial weekly download count of 7.1 million and 13.0K GitHub stars, Shiki is a mature and widely adopted solution. Its core functionality is written in Rust for extreme performance, but it exposes a JavaScript interface, resulting in a relatively large bundle size of 1.7 MB (gzipped) due to the WASM dependency and included grammars/themes.
A potential limitation to consider is the bundle size, which might be a concern for performance-critical client-side applications where every kilobyte counts. Developers may need to strategically load grammars and themes or explore alternative, smaller highlighting libraries if bundle size is an absolute constraint.
When to use
- When rendering code blocks within Markdown on the client-side or server-side with accurate TextMate grammar support.
- When integrating syntax highlighting into static site generators like Astro or Next.js using dedicated plugins.
- When programmatic control over themes and grammars is required, using the `getHighlighter` API for custom configurations.
- When targeting environments that support WebAssembly (WASM) for near-native highlighting performance.
- When ensuring code examples maintain consistent and beautiful styling across different browsers and platforms.
- When migrating from older syntax highlighting solutions and seeking improved accuracy and speed.
When NOT to use
- If your application needs to highlight only a handful of extremely simple code snippets and bundle size is a critical concern, consider a lighter solution using basic regex.
- When targeting environments where WASM execution is not supported or is heavily restricted.
- If you require syntax highlighting for obscure languages not covered by TextMate grammars or readily available Shiki grammars.
- When only simple, unstyled code blocks are sufficient and the visual enhancement provided by Shiki is not a priority.
- If you are building a serverless function with strict payload size limits, the 1.7 MB (gzipped) bundle might be prohibitive.