While I was updating this blog to use Jekyll, I wanted to enable some nice syntax highlighting for any code snippets I may post. Jekyll provides support for this through Pygments which is a pretty mature and widely used syntax highlighter built on Python.

I find it a little ironic that I need to install Python to enable a feature in a Ruby program. Though it is nice to see that the Jekyll team isn’t afraid to leverage great tools even if they aren’t written in Ruby.

I should note that this is my first experience doing anything with Python. That said, here are the steps I fumbled through to install Pygments. This is officially the first Python egg I’ve ever hatched.

What the heck is an egg? Eggs are one way to package up a group of Python scripts for easy distribution. This makes eggs the equivelant of Ruby gems.

To create or install eggs you need to have easy_install installed.

Here are the steps I took to do that.

1. Download ez_setup.py from http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

   Note: The official documenation for easy_install can be found at http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/EasyInstall.

2. From the command line run: python ez_setup.py. This will put an easy_install.exe file (and related scripts) in your C:\Python2x\Scripts folder.

   Note: If your Python scripts folder is not already in your PATH environment variable you may want to add it. This will make it easier to run scripts from that directory later on.

Now that easy_install is available, I can download and install the Pygments egg that I need.

1. Download the latest Pygments egg for your version of Python from http://pygments.org/download

2. From the command line run: easy_install Pygments-x.y.z-pyX.egg.

3. This will put add a ‘pygmentize’ script to your default Python scripts folder (probably C:\Python2x\Script).

And that’s it. Of course after going through all of that I discovered that there is a bug in the current release of Jekyll that breaks its pygments support on Windows. Fortunately someone has fixed this bug in a fork of Jekyll but I haven’t gotten around to trying that out yet. So for now I have no fancy syntax highlighting, but I did learn how to install an egg!

You can find much more knowledgable information on Python Eggs here and here.