A picture of your code, for somewhere that will not take code
Paste a snippet into almost anything that is not an editor and you
get one color, a proportional font and indentation that drifts — so
people screenshot their editor instead and ship their own filename,
their own scrollbar and whatever was in the next tab. This makes the
picture on purpose.
What people make these for
- Slide decks. Conference talks, internal reviews, lecture
notes — the one place a code font and real syntax color are worth
the most and survive the least.
- Posts on social media. X, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky and
Threads all flatten a pasted snippet into gray prose. An image is
the only format they keep.
- Blog posts, newsletters and release notes written in a CMS
whose editor has no code block, or has one that mangles the
indentation.
- Documentation and READMEs — a picture for the part of a
page that is scanned rather than copied, next to the real code
block people will copy from.
- Tickets, bug reports and code review comments in Jira,
Linear, Confluence, Notion or Slack, where the point is usually
two lines out of twenty.
- Email. Most clients strip a code block to plain text and
some reflow it; an attachment or an inline image does not move.
- Teaching material — handouts, worksheets and exam papers
that get printed, where color and alignment have to survive a
trip through a word processor.
- Terminal sessions. Install steps and command transcripts,
with the prompt, the command and the output told apart rather than
colored as if the whole thing were source.
- Thumbnails and cover images for a video, a course or a
talk listing, where a few lines of code have to read at a glance.
- Explaining a diff or a fix — pick out the lines that
matter and the rest dims, so a picture of twenty lines can still
say which three are the point.
Two things come out
- A PNG at the width or height you ask for.
- The same snippet as colored HTML, for pasting straight
into Google Docs, Word, Notion or an email with the colors intact
— still selectable, searchable text rather than a picture.
Everything is drawn in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded,
which is the part that matters when the snippet came out of a
private repository.