Documentation

Styles

Creating Own Styles
Style Rules
Builtin Styles
Getting a list of available styles

Pygments comes with some builtin styles that work for both the HTML and LaTeX formatter.

The builtin styles can be looked up with the get_style_by_name function:

>>> from pygments.styles import get_style_by_name
>>> get_style_by_name('colorful')
<class 'pygments.styles.colorful.ColorfulStyle'>

You can pass a instance of a Style class to a formatter as the style option in form of a string:

>>> from pygments.styles import get_style_by_name
>>> HtmlFormatter(style='colorful').style
<class 'pygments.styles.colorful.ColorfulStyle'>

Or you can also import your own style (which must be a subclass of pygments.style.Style) and pass it to the formatter:

>>> from yourapp.yourmodule import YourStyle
>>> HtmlFormatter(style=YourStyle).style
<class 'yourapp.yourmodule.YourStyle'>

Creating Own Styles

So, how to create a style? All you have to do is to subclass Style and define some styles:

from pygments.style import Style
from pygments.token import Keyword, Name, Comment, String, Error, \
     Number, Operator, Generic

class YourStyle(Style):
    default_style = ""
    styles = {
        Comment:                'italic #888',
        Keyword:                'bold #005',
        Name:                   '#f00',
        Name.Function:          '#0f0',
        Name.Class:             'bold #0f0',
        String:                 'bg:#eee #111'
    }

That's it. There are just a few rules. When you define a style for Name the style automatically also affects Name.Function and so on. If you defined 'bold' and you don't want boldface for a subtoken use 'nobold'.

(Philosophy: the styles aren't written in CSS syntax since this way they can be used for a variety of formatters.)

default_style is the style inherited by all token types.

To make the style usable for Pygments, you must

either register it as a plugin (see the plugin docs)
or drop it into the styles subpackage of your Pygments distribution one style class per style, where the file name is the style name and the class name is StylenameClass. For example, if your style should be called "mondrian", name the class MondrianStyle, put it into the file mondrian.py and this file into the pygments.styles subpackage directory.

Style Rules

Here a small overview of all allowed styles:

bold: render text as bold
nobold: don't render text as bold (to prevent subtokens being highlighted bold)
italic: render text italic
noitalic: don't render text as italic
underline: render text underlined
nounderline: don't render text underlined
bg:: transparent background
bg:#000000: background color (black)
border:: no border
border:#ffffff: border color (white)
#ff0000: text color (red)
noinherit: don't inherit styles from supertoken

Note that there may not be a space between bg: and the color value since the style definition string is split at whitespace. Also, using named colors is not allowed since the supported color names vary for different formatters.

Furthermore, not all lexers might support every style.

Builtin Styles

Pygments ships some builtin styles which are maintained by the Pygments team.

To get a list of known styles you can use this snippet:

>>> from pygments.styles import STYLE_MAP
>>> STYLE_MAP.keys()
['default', 'emacs', 'friendly', 'colorful']

Getting a list of available styles

New in Pygments 0.6.

Because it could be that a plugin registered a style, there is a way to iterate over all styles:

>>> from pygments.styles import get_all_styles
>>> styles = list(get_all_styles())

Did you like the documentation? Do you have suggestions? Leave your comment here!

lars@bauerdata.dk wrote on Jan. 4, 2010:

I have a problem.
pygmetize file.py
makes nice colors on stdout

pygmentize -f html -o demo.htm action.py
makes a file demo.htm without all the nice colors

how do i get colours in my .htm files ?

stu.axon+pygments@gmail.com wrote on June 9, 2009:

Would it be possible to make a console pager using this?

In particular I'm thinking of something written in python that works in the windows console.

Andre Roberge wrote on Aug. 28, 2008:

To make a style available for Pygments, it is written above:
===
or drop it into the styles subpackage of your Pygments distribution one style class per style, where the file name is the style name and the class name is StylenameClass.
===
An additional step is required if setuptools is not present (?or? if pygments is not installed as a separate package?):
one must add an entry in STYLE_MAP (pygments.style.__init__.py).