Line numbers
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============
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Highlight.js' notable lack of line numbers support is not an oversight but a
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feature. Following is the explanation of this policy from the current project
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maintainer (hey guys!):
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One of the defining design principles for highlight.js from the start was
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simplicity. Not the simplicity of code (in fact, it's quite complex) but
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the simplicity of usage and of the actual look of highlighted snippets on
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HTML pages. Many highlighters, in my opinion, are overdoing it with such
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things as separate colors for every single type of lexemes, striped
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backgrounds, fancy buttons around code blocks and — yes — line numbers.
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The more fancy stuff resides around the code the more it distracts a
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reader from understanding it.
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This is why it's not a straightforward decision: this new feature will not
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just make highlight.js better, it might actually make it worse simply by
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making it look more bloated in blog posts around the Internet. This is why
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I'm asking people to show that it's worth it.
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The only real use-case that ever was brought up in support of line numbers
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is referencing code from the descriptive text around it. On my own blog I
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was always solving this either with comments within the code itself or by
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breaking the larger snippets into smaller ones and describing each small
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part separately. I'm not saying that my solution is better. But I don't
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see how line numbers are better either. And the only way to show that they
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are better is to set up some usability research on the subject. I doubt
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anyone would bother to do it.
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Then there's maintenance. So far the core code of highlight.js is
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maintained by only one person — yours truly. Inclusion of any new code in
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highlight.js means that from that moment I will have to fix bugs in it,
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improve it further, make it work together with the rest of the code,
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defend its design. And I don't want to do all this for the feature that I
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consider "evil" and probably will never use myself.
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This position is `subject to discuss <http://groups.google.com/group/highlightjs>`_.
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Also it doesn't stop anyone from forking the code and maintaining line-numbers implementation separately.
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