Syntaxmate

A fast, Rust-native syntax highlighter powered by TextMate grammars.

Bundled languages and GitHub themes, incremental highlighting, safe HTML and ANSI output, and no native Oniguruma dependency.

Documentation · Examples · Benchmarks · Languages · Compatibility · Contributing

Usage

[dependencies]
syntaxmate = "0.2"

use syntaxmate::Highlighter;

let highlighter = Highlighter::bundled()?;
let output = highlighter.highlight_html(
    "rust",
    "fn main() { println!(\"<hello>\"); }",
    "github-dark",
)?;

assert!(output.status().is_complete());
println!("{}", output.as_str());
# Ok::<(), syntaxmate::Error>(())

For custom grammars, themes, and incremental use, start with the compiled examples. See rendering for output options and source/document pairing requirements.

For structured output, document and incremental APIs share the same token types:

use syntaxmate::{Highlighter, HighlightedToken};

let highlighter = Highlighter::bundled()?;
let document = highlighter.highlight("rust", "let x = true;", "github-dark")?;
let token: &HighlightedToken = &document.lines()[0].tokens()[0];
assert!(token.scopes().any(|scope| scope == "keyword.other.rust"));
assert_eq!(token.range(), 0..3);
# Ok::<(), syntaxmate::Error>(())

See Migrating from 0.1 for the upcoming 0.2 API changes.

Binary size

Embed only the languages you need with the subset-bundle command and loading workflow. default-features = false omits embedded grammars and themes; custom catalogs and shared Highlighter instances remain available.

Measured on Linux x86-64, 2026-09-27, Rust 1.98.1: a consumer using include_bytes!, Catalog::from_static, and Highlighter::tokenize, with lto="fat", codegen-units=1, panic="abort", and strip=true:

These are complete executables, including the engine. Dependencies and licenses are included in each bundle; embedded languages explain much of the web set's size. Results depend on the target and consumer code.

License

MIT