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We've had more questions lately in which people asked about specific code from various Bitcoin-related codebases. I've also been approached by a developer who requested that we get Code Syntax Highlighting. I reached out to the Community Manager team who told me that it could be made to happen if the site's community agreed.

Please weigh in: Do we want Code Syntax Highlighting for Bitcoin Stack Exchange?

See also this prior request from a decade ago: Code Syntax Highlighting - Is Code In-Scope For Bitcoin.SE?

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  • 2
    Just reviewed your request and the syntax highlighting is enabled.
    – SpencerG StaffMod
    Commented Oct 7, 2022 at 19:04

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
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Yes, absolutely! I think syntax highlighting will really help make a ton of answers easier to parse.

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Yes, of course, I don't see a reason why not, and there are many hundreds of questions that would benefit from this. These appear to be the most popular programming tags:

298 questions
253 questions
172 questions
134 questions
92 questions
84 questions
83 questions
66 questions
56 questions

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  • You could perhaps also mention [bitcoin-core-development] which we use for questions about the Bitcoin Core source code with 541 questions :)
    – Murch Mod
    Commented Sep 27, 2022 at 15:42
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    Or, I could go through all questions tagged with [bitcoin-core-development] and make sure they also have [c++] where applicable. Looking through a few of them it appears most don't actually contain code snippets, more often it's bitcoin-cli commands.
    – Vojtěch Strnad
    Commented Sep 27, 2022 at 15:50
  • It was just a loose idea. :) Going through all those questions sounds like a lot of work, I'm not sure that's necessary. I'd rather your valuable attention be spent on other stuff like e.g. your excellent edits on wiki excerpts
    – Murch Mod
    Commented Sep 27, 2022 at 16:12
  • Thank you! Though I do like to occasionally just go and spend some time fixing tags, so this wouldn't be dividing my attention.
    – Vojtěch Strnad
    Commented Sep 27, 2022 at 16:47
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I have been spoiled and can't live without it. Often when I have trouble grokking a piece of code online, I paste it into VS Code and the clouds part. Would be great to have it here.

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Yes.

I'd also like to see LaTeX rendering...

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    Mh, I was thinking that we should maybe have a second topic for that.
    – Murch Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2022 at 13:16
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Yes, please! I think it would be pretty helpful

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I think this would be an excellent addition to the site, +1

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I always wondered why it didn't have syntax highlightning - given it is a sister side of stack overflow.

I wonder though which programming language it will be? I am pretty sure they can't support Bitcoin Scrip easily. And the typical Code Blocks syntax that we have don't signal which language is being used. If we had to signal it we would have to edit many posts.

Tl;DR: yes please!

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  • It doesn't help that Bitcoin scripts are often written with placeholder variables like <key> CHECKSIG, and AFAIK there is no standard for that.
    – Vojtěch Strnad
    Commented Sep 23, 2022 at 7:14
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    "I always wondered why it didn't have syntax highlighting" ex-SE staff explained the reason on How to get syntax highlighting activated on another SE site?: "The problem is with performance (two additional resources - JS and CSS), these are additional HTTP calls meaning pages load a bit slower. Additionally, the JS needs to run on each and every question page load on sites where it is enabled, the actual work required to highlight is not trivial and takes time."
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Sep 24, 2022 at 19:54

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