Gitweb Line Highlighting

I made a few more changes today to support line highlighting of gitweb blobs. Like SyntaxHighlighter, the line highlighting is also completely JavaScript driven. When you highlight a line, it updates the fragment portion of the URL in your browser. Then when you send the URL (with the fragment) to someone, they will see the same highlighted code.

Click here for a sample of code highlighting.

Fun exercise in my quest to catch up and learn JavaScript, CSS, et al.

I couldn’t do this by modifying the query string, because that causes a browser reload when changing window.location. I could perhaps have made a “create hyperlink” button that puts the hyperlink with a modified query string into your paste buffer, but that isn’t as easy as just copying the address out of your browser address bar.

Gitweb Support for SyntaxHighlighter

After getting Gitosis set up on my Hackintosh, I set up gitweb as well. But vanilla gitweb is really ugly; it’s almost as bad as sitting at a console typing the git commands manually. So I spent a good day or so trying to tweak gitweb to work with SyntaxHighlighter. For the longest time, SyntaxHighlighter simply would not work on any page at all. After prodding for a while, I finally figured out that it was due to gitweb.cgi returning the content-type as “application/xhtml+xml” instead of “text/html”.

Click here to see a sample gitweb repository with SyntaxHighlighter enabled. Navigate around the projects, and click any of the language specific blob links (.c, .cs, etc) to see the new highlighting.

// This is SyntaxHighlighter, and
// it now works in gitweb!
if (true)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Hooray!");
}

Head over to my GitHub repository to get my git fork with the tweaked gitweb and instructions!

P.S. This was my first time hacking at Perl. I feel violated.

P.P.S. The Perl brush is intentionally disabled. It is a little buggy.