Highlighting Shell Commands in Markdown

Markdown is a versatile markup language for creating formatted text. While basic Markdown handles structure well, adding syntax highlighting for code snippets, especially shell commands, greatly improves readability. This tutorial explains how to effectively highlight shell commands within your Markdown documents.

Understanding Code Blocks

In Markdown, code blocks are created using backticks (). A single line of code can be enclosed in single backticks: ls -l`. For multi-line code blocks, use three backticks (“`). The key to syntax highlighting lies in specifying the language after the opening three backticks.

Highlighting Shell Commands

Several options exist for highlighting shell commands, depending on the Markdown renderer you’re using (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, a static site generator). Here’s a breakdown of the most common and reliable methods:

• console: This is generally the most widely supported and recommended approach for highlighting shell sessions. It’s designed to replicate the look of a terminal, including prompts.

  ```console
  user@machine:~$ ls -l
  total 4
  -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 1234 Oct 26 10:00 myfile.txt
  

• shell: This is another common option and often works well. It’s a more generic identifier for shell scripts and commands.

  ```shell
  #!/bin/bash
  echo "Hello, world!"
  

• Specific Shells (bash, zsh, sh): You can also specify the specific shell you’re using. This can provide more precise highlighting, but may not be universally supported.

  ```bash
  #!/bin/bash
  echo "This is a Bash script"
  

• Alternative: properties (for highlighting the command itself) This approach doesn’t highlight the entire block as code, but it effectively bolds or highlights the first word, which is often the command name. This is useful when you want to display a command within a paragraph.

  ```properties
  npm run build
  

  renders as npm run build

Choosing the Right Approach

• For complete shell scripts or multi-line commands, console, shell, bash, or zsh are best.
• If you want to show a command as it would appear in a terminal session (with prompts), console is the preferred choice.
• If you only need to highlight a command within a paragraph of text, properties can be a quick and effective solution.

Testing and Compatibility

Keep in mind that Markdown rendering engines can vary. Always test your highlighted code blocks in the target renderer to ensure they display as expected. Refer to the documentation of your specific Markdown processor (e.g., GitHub Flavored Markdown) for a list of supported languages and syntax highlighting options. You can find a list of supported languages for the highlight.js library (often used for Markdown rendering) at https://highlightjs.org/.