trishume/syntect

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2409 stars · 175 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

syntect is a Rust library for high-quality syntax highlighting that uses Sublime Text syntax definitions (grammars). It parses source code into scoped annotations and renders them as colored HTML or ANSI terminal output, with APIs suitable for building text editors.

Use cases

• add syntax highlighting to a Rust application
• highlight code blocks to HTML for a static site or blog
• render colored code in a terminal with ANSI escapes
• build a text editor in Rust with incremental re-highlighting
• cache parse states for code intelligence features
• highlight many languages without writing custom grammars

When to choose

• you need fast, high-quality highlighting for many languages in Rust
• you want Sublime Text / TextMate grammar compatibility including edge cases
• you're building a Rust text editor and need access to parse internals
• you want bundled syntax definitions with no external files to manage

When to avoid

• your project is not in Rust
• you need Tree-sitter-based highlighting or error-tolerant parsing
• you need a standalone CLI highlighter rather than a library
• you need actively developed new features, since the project is mostly complete and in maintenance

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

parser developer-tools developer-tools text-editors programming-languages rust cross-platform syntax-highlighting sublime-text-grammars textmate code-intelligence html-output ansi-terminal

Member repositories

For agents

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