Pybites Carbon

A small utility to generate beautiful code images using the awesome carbon service.

Install

You can get it from PyPI:

pip install pybites-carbon

Slow internet

If you have a slow internet connection you can optionally set SECONDS_SLEEP_BEFORE_DOWNLOAD to a value higher than the default 3. This is the time the script waits between clicking on "export image" and closing the driver connection to the carbon site (ending the script).

export SECONDS_SLEEP_BEFORE_DOWNLOAD=10

Usage

You can load in code from a file, the clipboard or a snippet. You can change the language, the image background and theme. You can also provide a different directory to store the image. Lastly, this tool uses Selenium in headless mode, to see what it does in the foreground, use -i (or --interactive).

$ carbon -h
usage: carbon [-h] [-v] (-f CODE | -c | -s CODE) [-i] [-l LANGUAGE] [-b BACKGROUND] [-t THEME] [-d DESTINATION] [-w WT]
              [--driver-path DRIVER_PATH]

Create a carbon code image

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit
  -f CODE, --file CODE  File with code (default: None)
  -c, --clipboard       Use code on clipboard (default: None)
  -s CODE, --snippet CODE
                        Code snippet (default: None)
  -i, --interactive     Run Selenium in interactive (not headless) mode (default: False)
  -l LANGUAGE, --language LANGUAGE
                        Programming language (default: python)
  -b BACKGROUND, --background BACKGROUND
                        Background color (default: #ABB8C3)
  -t THEME, --theme THEME
                        Name of the theme (default: seti)
  -d DESTINATION, --destination DESTINATION
                        Specify folder where image should be stored (defaults to current directory) (default:
                        /Users/bbelderbos/code/pybites-carbon)
  -w WT, --wt WT        Windows control theme (default: sharp)
  --driver-path DRIVER_PATH
                        Path to the executable, if it is not given it reads value from environment variable
                        (DRIVER_PATH) (default: /Users/bbelderbos/bin/chromedriver)

Examples

Make a hello world snippet carbon image:
```
$ carbon -s 'print("hello world")'
```
Resulting image:

Make a code image of a file, let's pick a FastAPI app I am working on:

$ cat $HOME/code/infinite-scroll/main.py
from fastapi import FastAPI, Query
from sqlmodel import select, Session

from youtube.models import YouTube, YouTubeRead
from youtube.db import engine

app = FastAPI()


@app.get("/videos/", response_model=list[YouTubeRead])
def read_videos(offset: int = 0, limit: int = Query(default=100, lte=100)):
	with Session(engine) as session:
		videos = session.exec(
			select(YouTube).offset(offset).limit(limit)
		).all()
		return videos

Run the script with the -f option:

carbon -f $HOME/code/infinite-scroll/main.py

Resulting image:

Copying the following lines to the clipboard:

Here is my favorite feature: make an image from code I currently have on my OS clipboard (thanks pyperclip):

Try it out, copy this code:
```
from time import sleep

sleep(2)
```
Then run the script with -c:
```
$ carbon -c
```
Resulting image:

Useful shell aliases

I added this alias to my .zshrc to make it even easier:

(Actually I created this image having this alias line on my clipboard, then I ran: carbon -c -l application/x-sh -t monokai -b #D7D7BE -d $HOME/Downloads)

Developer setup

Make a virtual environment and install the requirements-dev.txt file or just run make setup.

Also install Tesseract itself. Refer to their instructions for details or install on Ubuntu with:

sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

Again you can increase the time the script takes to download the image, in case you have a slower internet connection:

echo "SECONDS_SLEEP_BEFORE_DOWNLOAD=10" >> .env

(>> means append (not override) to an existing file)

The script uses Selenium in headless mode. The resulting carbon.png image will be downloaded to your computer unless you specify a different destination directory using -d (or --destination).

To run the tests, type pytest or make test (it uses pytesseract - in the dev requirements - to read the text from the generated carbon image file).

We recommend running black before committing code. To set this up run this after checking out the repo:

$ pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit

Enjoy and feel free to mention me or Pybites when you post one of the created images on Twitter.

PyBites-Open-Source / pybites-carbon