alecthomas/chroma

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

5022 stars · 507 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Chroma is a general-purpose syntax highlighter written in pure Go, heavily based on Pygments, with translators for Pygments lexers and styles. It converts source code into syntax-highlighted HTML, ANSI-colored terminal text, and other formats, and ships with a CLI tool.

Use cases

• highlight code snippets as HTML for a blog or docs site
• colorize source code in terminal output with ANSI colors
• add syntax highlighting to a Go static site generator
• identify the language of a code snippet automatically
• convert Pygments lexers and styles for use in Go
• highlight code in a CLI tool written in Go

When to choose

• you need syntax highlighting in a Go project without external dependencies
• you want Pygments-like highlighting without a Python runtime
• you need both HTML and terminal (ANSI) output formats
• you need support for a very wide range of languages

When to avoid

• you need a JavaScript/browser-side highlighter
• you need features Pygments has that Chroma lacks
• you are not working in Go and can use Pygments directly

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser developer-tools cli developer-tools web-development go cross-platform cli syntax-highlighting pygments html-formatter ansi-colors lexers command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="alecthomas/chroma")