On the original front page of this blog (whether it’s live at the time you’re reading this or not, I can’t say) there was, from the default Jekyll Bootstrap index.html, a little line that read $ rm -rf _posts/core-samples. It’s of course a bash/shell session to delete the core-samples folder from the default Jekyll Bootstrap repo. What I wanted to do was quite simple: in my experimenting around with Pygments Highlighting, I wanted to simply highlight it as a shell session.
It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
First, I tried {% highlight bash %}. A shot in the dark. What I was hoping, at the very least, was to find that the class for the $ was different from the class for the rest of the line. And it was!
Success? No. Not quite.
I went to the Pygments site and I found that the stuff for the language ‘bash’ was for bash scripts, not bash sessions. So even though I kinda sorta got the result I wanted, I also was kinda sorta doing it the wrong way.
The first thing I tried after that was the next entry down on the Pygments demo site: bash session. The space between ‘bash’ and ‘session’ was a problem for me. bash session ended up using bash highlighting – obviously the ‘session’ part was being ignored, presumably because of the space. I tried bashsession, bash-session and bash_session, all of which resulted in errors due to not corresponding to any supported Pygments language.
And then I tried shell-session and, I forget why, but for some reason that didn’t work either. It wasn’t an error, it just didn’t change the html classes of the code the way I expected.
Googling a bit, searching through Stack Overflow, queries like ‘Jekyll pygments multi word language’ – nothing. Nothing describing my particular problem.
So, the entry in the Pygments demo page for shell-session is ‘Shell Session’, and the entry I was trying before was ‘Bash Session’, which implied {% highlight bash-session %} was what I was going for. But I already tried that and it didn’t work. I tried it again, and it didn’t work again.
So I begin thinking about opening a Stack Overflow question. I’m going to ask how to get ‘Bash Session’ to work – it HAS to work, given that it’s a Pygments-supported language. And so I go to the ‘Bash Session’ demo page again and am about to copy the url when I notice the url says ‘lang=console’. I go back to ‘Shell Session’ and find the url says ‘lang-shell-session’.
So that’s when I realized that the Pygments demo site, as far as I can tell, stores the lang part of {% highlight lang %} in the url. {% highlight console %} corresponds to Bash Session.
They could have made it more obvious.