What is prettyprint?

prettyprint is a library that makes code and text look beautiful when printed to a terminal. It adds syntax highlighting (color-coding for different parts of code), line numbers, headers, and other visual polish that you'd normally have to build yourself. Think of it like taking plain code and making it look the way it does in a polished code editor or documentation website. The library works by taking code, either from a file or a string, and intelligently coloring different parts based on the programming language. So keywords show up in one color, strings in another, comments in another, and so on. You can customize it heavily: turn off line numbers if you want, add or remove the header, swap between different color themes, or change how it handles special characters. It's designed to handle the annoying details that come with printing to a terminal, like making sure output fits nicely on screen and works on Windows as well as Mac and Linux. Anyone building a command-line tool that displays code would find this useful. If you're making a documentation generator, a code review tool, a teaching platform, or even just a custom REPL that needs to show code beautifully, this library saves you from reinventing the wheel. The README specifically mentions it was built for cargo-inspect, a tool that shows you Rust code after macro expansion, a case where you really want nicely formatted output to understand what's happening under the hood. One thing to know: the maintainer notes that this library is in maintenance mode and recommends new projects consider using bat instead (another popular code-printing tool that now works as a library). That said, pull requests are still reviewed and dependencies are kept current, so it's stable enough to use, just maybe not the place to expect major new features going forward.