Hysen Labscarbon
:black_heart: Create and share beautiful images of your source code
Carbon: turning source code into shareable images
A tool for making code screenshots look intentional, with configurable syntax themes and fonts, one click sharing, and accounts for saving snippets.
What it improves
Carbon creates and shares beautiful images of source code. The README positions it as an improvement on the aesthetics of typical code screenshots, which tend to look flat and forgettable on social media. The whole product is one page in a browser, which keeps the barrier to trying it near zero. JavaScript is the primary language, the license is MIT, and the homepage is carbon.now.sh. The README is translated into many languages, which hints at the size of the audience.
Customization and sharing
You can customize the syntax theme and font style of the image. Sharing is meant to be quick: save the image or a link with one click. Snippets can be saved by creating an account, and shared snippets are automatically unfurled on Twitter and Slack. Account creation is optional, only needed when you want snippets saved. The sharing flow targets the places developers already post code.
Getting code in
Three routes get code into the editor: drop a file onto it, append a GitHub gist ID to the URL, or just start typing. Once the code is there, the image can be adjusted through syntax theme, background color, window theme, padding, shadows, and fonts. The customization options are listed in the order you would actually reach for them.
Translation reach
The README is translated into many languages, including Spanish, Hindi, German, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Malayalam, Turkish, Korean, Tamil, French, Japanese, Swedish, Polish, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Italian, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, and Persian. The tool is presented as a community project, which the long translation list supports.
Community notes