ccampbell/rainbow

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3297 stars · 451 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Rainbow is a lightweight (~2.5kb) JavaScript syntax highlighting library for coloring code blocks in web pages. It works in the browser via a data-language attribute and in Node.js, supports many languages, and is fully themable with CSS and extendable with custom language rules.

Use cases

• highlight code snippets on a blog or documentation site
• add syntax coloring to pre/code blocks in HTML
• highlight source code in a Node.js script
• build a custom lightweight highlighter bundle with only needed languages
• create custom CSS themes for code display
• extend an existing language with custom highlighting rules

When to choose

• you need a very small, dependency-free highlighter for a website
• you want CSS-based theming and easy language extension
• you only need highlighting for a handful of languages

When to avoid

• you need highlighting for many obscure languages out of the box
• you need server-side rendering integration with a modern framework
• you need actively developed features or frequent updates

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

parser ui-components developer-tools web-development frontend documentation browser syntax-highlighting code-display lightweight css-theming extensible nodejs javascript

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ccampbell/rainbow")