Overview

There are wide variety of options available to customize the display of source code within HTML documents, including:

  1. Hiding some or all code that was executed by Knitr or Jupyter.
  2. Code folding for executed code (hidden by default and expandable by readers).
  3. Handling code that overflows the available horizontal display space.
  4. View the source code of the markdown file used to generate the document.
  5. Syntax highlighting themes and other options to control the appearance of code.
  6. Copy to clipboard button for code blocks.
  7. Generating hyperlinks to online documentation for functions used within code blocks via the downlit package (note that this option currently only works when using the Knitr engine).

Details on using all of these options are provided below.

Hiding Code

For many documents you may want to hide all of the executable source code used to produce dynamic outputs. You can do this by specifying echo: false in the document execute options. For example:

---
title: "My Document"
execute:
  echo: false
jupyter: python3
---

Note that we can override this option on a per code-block basis. For example:

```{python}
#| echo: true

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1,2,3,4])
plt.show()
```

Code block options are included in a special comment at the top of the block (lines at the top prefaced with #| are considered options).

Folding Code

Use the code-fold option to include code but have it hidden by default using the HTML <details> tag. For example, click the Code button to see the code that produced this plot.

Code 
library(ggplot2)
dat <- data.frame(cond = rep(c("A", "B"), each=10),
                  xvar = 1:20 + rnorm(20,sd=3),
                  yvar = 1:20 + rnorm(20,sd=3))

ggplot(dat, aes(x=xvar, y=yvar)) +
    geom_point(shape=1) + 
    geom_smooth()

Here we specify both code-fold: true as well as custom summary text (the default is just “Code” as shown above):

format:
  html:
    code-fold: true
    code-summary: "Show the code"

Valid values for code-fold include:

Value Behavior
false No folding (default)
true Fold code (initially hidden)
show Fold code (initially shown)

Use the code-fold and code-summary chunk attributes to control this on a chunk-by-chunk basis:

```{r}
#| code-fold: true
#| code-summary: "Show the code"
```

Code Overflow

In some cases the width of source code will overflow the available horizontal display space. By default, this will result in a horizontal scroll bar for the code block. However if you prefer not to have scrollbars you can have the longer lines wrap instead.

To set the global default behavior use the code-overflow option. For example:

format:
  html:
    code-overflow: wrap

Valid values for code-overflow are:

Option Description
scroll Scroll code blocks that exceed available width (default, corresponds to white-space: pre).
wrap Wrap lines of code that exceed available width (corresponds to white-space: pre-wrap).

You can also override the global default on a per-code-block basis. For computational cells you do this with the code-overflow cell option:

```{python}
#| code-overflow: wrap

# very long line of code....
```

For a static code block, add the .code-overflow-scroll or .code-overflow-wrap CSS class:

```{.python .code-overflow-wrap}
# very long line of code....
```

Note that irrespective of these options, code will always wrap within printed HTML output (as it would otherwise be clipped off the edge of the page).

Code Tools

You can include a Code menu in the header of your document that provides various tools for readers to interact with the source code. Specify code-tools: true to activate these tools:

format:
  html:
    code-fold: true
    code-tools: true

If you have a document that includes folded code blocks then the Code menu will present options to show and hide the folded code as well as view the full source code of the document:

A screen shot of the header of a rendered Quarto document showing the result of setting both the code-fold and code-tools option to true. There is a drop-down menu labeled 'Code' to the right of the page title with a triangle pointing down. The menu is open and there are three options listed vertically beneath it: 'Hide All Code,' 'Show All Code,' and 'View Source.'

This document specifies code-tools: true in its options so you should see the Code menu above next to the main header.

You can control which of these options are made available as well as the “Code” caption text using sub-options of code-tools. For example, here we specify that we want only “View Source” (no toggling of code visibility) and no caption on the code menu:

format:
  html: 
    code-tools:
      source: true
      toggle: false
      caption: none

By default, the source code is embedded in the document and shown in a popup window like this:

A screenshot of this webpage with a pop-up window labeled 'Source Code' over it. This 'Source Code' window contains the raw markdown and R code used to write this page. There is an 'X' on the upper right corner of the 'Source Code' pop up to close it.

You can alternatively specify a URL for the value of source:

format:
  html: 
    code-tools:
      source: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-web/blob/main/index.md

If you are within a project and have specified a repo-url option then you can just use repo and the correct link to your source file will be generated:

format:
  html: 
    code-tools:
      source: repo

Note that the code-tools option is not available when you disable the standard HTML theme (e.g. if you specify the theme: none option).

Appearance

By default code blocks are rendered with a left border whose color is derived from the current theme. You can customize code chunk appearance with some simple options that control the background color and left border. Options can either be booleans to enable or disable the treatment or can be legal CSS color strings (or they could even be SASS variable names!).

Here is the default appearance for code blocks (code-block-background: true):

A block of code with a gray background.

You can instead use a left border treatment using the code-block-border-left option:

code-block-border-left: true

A block of code with a gray vertical stripe running along its left border. This code block has no background.

You can combine a background and border treatment as well as customize the left border color:

code-block-bg: true
code-block-border-left: "#31BAE9"

A block of code with a gray background and a blue vertical stripe running along its left border.

Highlighting

Pandoc will automatically highlight syntax in fenced code blocks that are marked with a language name. For example:

```python
1 + 1
```

Pandoc can provide syntax highlighting for over 140 different languages (see the output of quarto pandoc --list-highlight-languages for a list of all of them). If you want to provide the appearance of a highlighted code block for a language not supported, just use default as the language name.

You can specify the code highlighting style using highlight-style and specifying one of the supported themes. These themes are “adaptive”, which means they will automatically switch between a dark and light mode based upon the theme of the website. These are designed to work well with sites that include a dark and light mode.

  • a11y
  • arrow
  • atom-one
  • ayu
  • breeze
  • github
  • gruvbox

All of the standard Pandoc themes are also available:

  • pygments
  • tango
  • espresso
  • zenburn
  • kate
  • monochrome
  • breezedark
  • haddock

As well as an additional set of extended themes, including:

  • dracula
  • mokokai
  • nord
  • oblivion
  • printing
  • radical
  • solarized
  • vim-dark

The highlight-style option determines which theme is used. For example:

highlight-style: github

Highlighting themes can provide either a single highlighting definition or two definitions, one optimized for a light colored background and another optimized for a dark color background. When available, Quarto will automatically select the appropriate style based upon the code chunk background color’s darkness. Users may always opt to specify the full name (e.g. atom-one-dark) to by pass this automatic behavior.

By default, code is highlighted using the arrow theme, which is optimized for accessibility. We’ve additionally introduced the arrow-dark theme which is designed to provide accessible highlighting against dark backgrounds.

Examples of the light and dark themes:

Arrow (light)

Arrow (dark)

Ayu (light)

Ayu (dark)

Custom Highlighting

In addition to the built in themes available for syntax highlighting, you can also specify your own syntax highlighting by providing the path to a valid theme file (which is based upon the KDE XML syntax highlighting descriptions). Highlighting is implemented using skylighting.

For example:

---
highlight-style: custom.theme
---

In addition, if you’d like to provide adaptive themes, you may also pass both a light and dark theme file:

---
highlight-style: pygments

Copy Button

Hover over the code block below and you will see a copy icon in the top-right corner:

library(dygraphs)
dygraph(nhtemp, main = "New Haven Temperatures") %>% 
  dyRangeSelector(dateWindow = c("1920-01-01", "1960-01-01"))

This behavior is enabled by default but you configure it using the code-copy option:

format:
  html:
    code-copy: false

Valid values for code-copy include:

hover Show button on hover (default)
true Always show code copy button
false Never show code copy button

Code Linking

The code-link option enables hyper-linking of functions within code blocks to their online documentation:

format:
  html:
    code-link: true

Code linking is currently implemented only for the knitr engine (via the downlit package).