react-lowlight

Syntax highlighter for React, utilizing VDOM for efficient updates

• Thin wrapper on top of lowlight (Syntax highlighting using VDOM)
• Lowlight uses highlight.js under the hood, thus supports all the same syntaxes
• About ~18KB (6.5KB gziped) when using a single language syntax. Each language tends to pack on another ~2KB uncompressed.

Feel free to check out a super-simple demo.

Installation

This package is ESM only. In Node.js (version 12.20+, 14.14+, or 16.0+), install with npm:

$ npm install react-lowlight highlight.js

You'll also need to provide the highlight.js language definitions you want to use. We don't bundle these in order to not bloat the component with unused definitions.

Usage

import Lowlight from 'react-lowlight'

// Load any languages you want to use
// (see https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/tree/main/src/languages)
import javascript from 'highlight.js/lib/languages/javascript'

// Then register them with lowlight
Lowlight.registerLanguage('js', javascript)

ReactDOM.render(
  <Lowlight language="js" value="/* Code to highlight */" />,
  document.getElementById('target')
)

Note that the language property is optional, but significantly increases the speed and reliability of rendering.

If you want to load multiple languages at once

import Lowlight from 'react-lowlight'

import 'react-lowlight/common'
// import 'react-lowlight/all' // <- to import all languages

ReactDOM.render(
  <Lowlight language="js" value="/* Code to highlight */" />,
  document.getElementById('target')
)

Imports react-lowlight/common and react-lowlight/all are re-exports from lowlight. See here https://github.com/wooorm/lowlight#syntaxes for more details

Styling

Stylesheets are not automatically handled for you - but there is a bunch of premade styles for highlight.js which you can simply drop in and they'll "just work". You can either grab these from the source, or pull them in using a CSS loader - whatever works best for you. They're also available on unpkg:

<link
  rel="stylesheet"
  href="https://unpkg.com/browse/[email protected]/styles/default.css"
/>

If you have a bundler that supports CSS imports, you can do something like the following:

import 'highlight.js/styles/default.css'

Note that when using the markers feature, there is an additional class name called hljs-marker which is not defined by highlight js as it's not a part of its feature set. You can either set it yourself, or you can explicitly set class names on markers.

Props

Name	Description
className	Class name for the outermost pre tag. Default: lowlight
language	Language to use for syntax highlighting this value. Must be registered prior to usage.
value	The code snippet to syntax highlight
prefix	Class name prefix for individual node. Default: hljs-
subset	Array of languages to limit the auto-detection to.
inline	Whether code should be displayed inline (no <pre> tag, sets display: inline)
markers	Array of lines to mark. Can also be specified in {line: <num>, className: <class>} form

Dynamic loading

You can use Lowlight.hasLanguage(language) to check if a language has been registered. Combining this with Webpack's code splitting abilities (or something similar), you should be able to load definitions for languages on the fly.

License

MIT-licensed. See LICENSE.