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Shiki Twoslash

Critical points to understand about Shiki Twoslash which constrain future scope:

  • New features need to be useful in most codebases using twoslash.
  • All code sample needs to be atomically compiled. E.g. re-ordering should not affect code samples.
  • Everything needs to work without JS on the user's side. E.g. example, the TypeScript website ships Twoslash epubs/PDFs.
  • Don't make assumptions about the user environment. E.g. don't assume they use React etc.

Things I care about which might affect scope:

  • I expect people to understand the systems the use. E.g. Offering example CSS + JS, but not bundling it into the results.
  • The level of complexity in the output HTML. E.g. we probably won't syntax highlight hover info.
  • The speed of development. E.g. Shiki Twoslash caches code samples at Twoslash level, so the compiling happens only if the code sample changes.

Long Term Vision

Today, early June 2021, Shiki Twoslash is basically 1.0'd. It does everything the TypeScript website needs, and is in a good position to be used in blogs as seen on fatihkalifa.com and cpojer.net, and on serious technical documentation sites like TypeScript.

I, Orta, intend to keep maintaining Shiki Twoslash for a very long time, which means big changes will need an issue ahead of time because I can't maintain what I don't understand. Smaller things I can be flexible with.

I'm also a few years into Shiki Twoslash now, so I'm not sure how much low hanging fruit is available at this point.

Shiki Convergence

In the website I describe Shiki Twoslash as a 'polite but hard fork' of Shiki.

What that means is that the underlaying tokens -> HTML renderer is a complete fork from Shiki. E.g. these files won't call the original shiki renderers. I don't think I'll ever commit to re-using Shiki at at that level. Which means that there are features which Shiki may implement differently from Shiki Twoslash. For example, I copied gatsby-remark-vscode's line highlighting syntax and shiki may not.

We can take ideas (and features) from Shiki, and move them upstream too but convergence isn't a goal.

(2023 edit: there may be a world in which Shiki's plugin support is enough for Twoslash, if that happens, I'm open to moving to that.)