What is carbon-now.nvim?

carbon-now.nvim is a plugin for Neovim (a popular terminal-based code editor) that lets you turn your code into visually appealing images you can share. If you've ever seen a screenshot of code with a nice background, custom font, and syntax highlighting colors, that's the kind of image this tool creates. When you highlight a section of code in Neovim and run the command, the plugin takes your selection and sends it to a free web service that generates the styled image. You don't have to manually copy, paste, and configure anything in a browser. You can also customize how the final image looks, things like the color theme, font, background color, and whether to show line numbers, all from a simple configuration file in your editor. This is useful for developers, technical writers, or educators who frequently share code snippets on social media, in blog posts, or in presentations. Instead of taking a raw screenshot of your editor, you can produce polished, consistent images with a couple of keystrokes. The plugin also supports generating images from GitHub Gists, so you can quickly turn shared code files into images without opening them locally. The project is built in Lua and designed to integrate directly into the Neovim environment. It requires Neovim version 0.10 or higher and relies on an external web service to handle the actual image rendering. This means your code is sent to that service to generate the final product, which is worth noting if you're working with sensitive or private code.