carbon-app/carbon

Carbon is a web application that lets you turn a snippet of code into a beautiful, shareable image. If you have ever seen a screenshot of code on social media with a styled background, window chrome, and syntax highlighting, it was likely created with a tool like Carbon. The problem it solves is that plain screenshots of code editors look inconsistent and often lack visual polish, whereas Carbon produces clean, customizable images that look intentional and professional. Using Carbon is straightforward: you paste your code into the editor on the website, or import it by dropping a file or appending a GitHub Gist ID to the URL. From there you can customize the syntax highlighting theme, background color, window style, font, padding, and shadow. When you are happy, you export the image as a PNG or SVG, copy it directly to your clipboard, or share a link to a saved snippet. Saved snippets are particularly useful because they auto-unfurl on platforms like Twitter and Slack, showing the image preview while also giving viewers access to the original code through the link. The project also provides plugins for popular code editors including VS Code, Vim, Emacs, Atom, Sublime Text, and IntelliJ, so you can open a code selection in Carbon directly from your editor. Someone would use Carbon when writing a blog post, tutorial, tweet, or presentation where they want to show code in a visually appealing way. The project is built with JavaScript using the Next.js framework, runs as a progressive web app so it can be installed for offline use, and is hosted at carbon.now.sh.