🚀 Say Hello to Real-Time Syntax Highlighting in Code Blocks!

Avinoam

Hey Atlassian community!

We’ve heard you loud and clear—and today, we’re thrilled to share a game-changing update that makes writing, sharing, and collaborating on code in Confluence and Bitbucket Cloud better than ever.

 

🧠 The Problem

For a long time, code blocks in our cloud editor lacked one critical feature: syntax highlighting. This meant that choosing a language felt… well, pointless. It was especially painful in Live Docs, where syntax highlighting was completely absent in both edit and view modes.

“I'd love for my docs to be live, but I can't because syntax highlighting is a core feature for readers.”
— Beta user feedback

We knew we had to fix this. So we rebuilt the code block from the ground up.

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🎉 Introducing Real-Time Syntax Highlighting

Our new code blocks bring syntax highlighting directly into the editing experience. Now, what you see really is what you get—even in Live Docs!

• 🌈 Instant syntax highlighting as you type

• ✨ Improved language selection 

• 🔁 Editing and rendering now match perfectly—no more surprises after publishing

“Typing latency in big code blocks is actually significantly better than before.”
— Beta user feedback

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💪 Built for Scale and Speed

Whether you're editing a snippet or pasting in thousands of lines, the new code blocks are built to perform. Unlike some other tools that give up after a few hundred lines, Confluence now supports code blocks with millions of lines—smoothly.

🏎️ No crashes. No lag. Just blazing-fast performance.

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✨ Smarter, Smoother, More Natural

Along with syntax highlighting, you’ll notice:

• Language-specific indentation and formatting

• Automatic language detection when pasting from VSCode or uploading to Bitbucket

• A foundation for rapid iteration on more advanced features coming soon!

With this rollout — we're making the editor smarter and more powerful for technical teams across the board.

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🔮 What’s Next?

We’re already working on enhancements like:

• Custom themes

• Better keyboard shortcuts

• Advanced formatting tools

Stay tuned and let us know what you’d love to see next in the comments!

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Thanks for being on this journey with us. Try the new experience in Confluence Cloud and Bitbucket Cloud today—and happy coding! 🖖

— The Atlassian Editor Team 

Josh

@Avinoam this is a great feature! Thank you to you and the team for implementing.

We somehow missed this announcement in the Community until this article was highlighted in a recent roundup.

 

Are there any plans in the works to provide support for Atlassian languages in code blocks (e.g. JQL, AQL)?