New in Bitbucket Labs: Syntax highlighting on pull requests

[#1]

Hello all 👋 It’s Dave from the Bitbucket Cloud product team. Today we’re excited to introduce a small but important improvement to code review: Syntax highlighting on pull requests. It’s one of our highest-voted feature requests, and you can enable it today in Bitbucket Labs.

Once you switch on the feature, pull request diffs will automatically include highlighted syntax for hundreds of the most common programming languages.

Software developers spend many hours each week reviewing code, and highlighted syntax makes code that much more legible. The Bitbucket Cloud team has been dogfooding this feature for several weeks, and it’s made our code reviews noticeably smoother. We think your teams will appreciate it too.

How to activate this feature

To switch on syntax highlighting for your user account:

1. Visit Labs in your Bitbucket settings

2. Switch on the Enable syntax highlighting in diffs feature

Note: The syntax highlighting feature is disabled by default, so you’ll need to switch it on if you want to use it.

Known limitations

We’re leaving this feature in Bitbucket Labs for now while we work out a few known issues. Notably, this feature will likely conflict with third-party browser extensions that add functionality to the Bitbucket pull request page. If you experience problems after turning on this feature, try disabling those extensions.

Once we’ve ironed out known issues, we’ll roll this feature out to all users automatically. In the meantime, you can toggle the feature in Labs if you’d like to opt in or out at this time.

Tell us what you think

If you have feedback on this feature – or if you've found a bug – we'd love to hear from you. Head to the Bitbucket help menu > “Give feedback” to share your thoughts with us.

[Hyo]

Love it !!! It works well ! Very colorful and easy to watch Java project PR ! (no more gray gray things like in the past) Also My co-workers are satisfied with it. Thanks !

[Aron Gombas]

Very useful, but the color scheme is bizarre.

Why would someone color method and class names to red, a color traditionally associated with "error"?  Red method names, e.g., are also not looking good on removed lines, either...

[Victor Ripplinger]

This is a massive improvement for PRs for sure!

How can the .cpp files be colored but not even the .h files though? :(

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

@Victor Ripplinger Glad to hear it! And thanks for pointing out `.h` files - it was an oversight and we can easily add support for those.

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Hey @Aron Gombas, long time no talk! Thanks for the thoughts about the color scheme. We may make some tweaks based on the feedback we hear, so please let me know if there's anything else that feels off.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_ If I can ask for more, then these would be useful as well:

1. configurable "context" for diffs (no of lines before and after changes)
2. use pale colors on a dark background to make it easy for the eye
   1. but colors are always a subject for debate, so the best would be a selectable palette (like here, for example)

[Victor Ripplinger]

@Dave Parrish _Atlassian_Thanks, that's reassuring. :)

Then I'll also take the opportunity to request support for .qml files.

[Rickard Natt och Dag]

This is a great feature! I would like to request adding support for `.vue` files too.

[Dave Parrish _Atlassian_]

Just a quick update we've added support for `.h` and `.qml` file formats. `.vue` is in the works. :)

[Anuradha Kumari]

Pricing is involved or we can enable this feature for free?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Anuradha Kumari It is free of charge (as far as I can tell).