codeframe

Beautiful code screenshots from your terminal. No browser, no upload, no fuss.

One command → syntax-highlighted SVG with window chrome, traffic lights, and line numbers.

Why

You want a code screenshot for your README, blog post, slide deck, or tweet. Current options:

• Carbon.sh — opens a browser, pastes code, adjusts settings, downloads PNG. Every. Single. Time.
• Silicon — Rust. If you don't have cargo, you don't have Silicon.
• Freeze — Go. Same story.
• Screenshots — manually crop, inconsistent, not scalable.

codeframe is a single Python file. pip install, run, done. Output is SVG — scalable, tiny, embeddable anywhere.

Install

pip install pygments   # only dependency

Then grab codeframe.py or clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/Jah-yee/codeframe.git

Usage

# basic
python codeframe.py hello.py -o hello.svg

# pick a theme
python codeframe.py app.js --theme dracula -o app.svg

# pipe from stdin
cat main.rs | python codeframe.py --lang rust -o main.svg

# hide line numbers
python codeframe.py config.yml --no-lines -o config.svg

# list themes
python codeframe.py --list-themes

Themes

Five built-in themes. All with dark chrome, traffic lights, and proper syntax colors.

GitHub Dark (default)

Dracula

One Dark

Nord

GitHub Light

How It Works

1. Pygments tokenizes your code (500+ languages supported)
2. Tokens are mapped to theme-specific colors
3. SVG is built with <text> and <tspan> elements — no rasterization, no browser
4. Window chrome (traffic lights, filename, border) is added
5. Output is a single .svg file — scalable to any size

No headless browsers. No Puppeteer. No canvas. Just string concatenation into valid SVG.

Output Format

SVG output means:

• Scalable — renders crisp at any resolution
• Tiny — typically 5–15kb vs 200kb+ PNGs
• Embeddable — works in GitHub READMEs, HTML, Markdown, Notion
• Editable — it's just XML, tweak colors/fonts in any text editor
• Dark/light agnostic — the theme is baked in, no system preference issues

Supported Languages

Everything Pygments supports: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust, Go, C, C++, Java, Ruby, PHP, Swift, Kotlin, Bash, SQL, HTML, CSS, YAML, JSON, Markdown, and 300+ more.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Some ideas:

• More themes (Monokai, Solarized, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night)
• PNG/PDF output via cairosvg
• pip install codeframe with entry point
• Line highlighting (--highlight 5-8)
• Window title override (--title "my server")
• Diff mode (red/green highlighting)

License

MIT

One file. One dependency. Beautiful output.