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

carbon.now.sh by @dawn_labs is a wonderful tool that lets you generate beautiful images of your source code through a great UI, 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 ⚡️. 😎

• 🖼 Downloads the real, high-quality image (no DOM screenshots)
• ✨ Detects file type automatically
• 🗂 Supports all file extensions supported by carbon.now.sh and more
• 🖱 Allows selective highlighting via --start and --end
• ⚡️ Interactive mode via --interactive
• 🎒 Presets: save and reuse your favorite settings
• 🐶 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

$ npm i -g carbon-now-cli

$ yarn global add carbon-now-cli

$ npx carbon-now-cli <file>

carbon-now-cli requires Node.js >=8.

$ carbon-now --help

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

Usage
  $ carbon-now <file>

Options
  -s, --start          Starting line of <file>
  -e, --end            Ending line of <file>
  -i, --interactive    Interactive mode
  -l, --location       Image save location, default: cwd
  -o, --open           Open in browser instead of saving
  -p, --preset         Use a saved preset

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.

$ carbon-now unfold.js

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

Result:

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

$ 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 — they will default to sensible, nice-looking things.

If needed, you can always check the default settings.

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

Reads and creates image based only of lines 3 to 6, instead of the entire file. Will throw an error if -s > -e.

Of course selective mode can be combined with interactive mode, just with like any other option. 😊

Result (without interactive mode):

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

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

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

This saves a beautiful image of lines 3 to 6 to ~/Desktop, after accepting custom wishes via interactive mode.

If you’re not sure about how 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. 😌

This feature is currently only available through next. If you’d like access to it, update/install via:

npm i -g carbon-now-cli@next

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

However you use the carbon-now command, a ~/.carbon-now.json file will be created for you. This is where all your presets and settings of the last interactive run will live.

When running carbon-now with -i, you’ll be asked the following two questions last:

Answering yes and naming the preset (in this case presentation) will result in it 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"
  }
}

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:

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. 😊

MIT © Miloš Sutanovac