Printing Code Like It’s 1989

Which made me laugh, the 2016-2021 dialogue and still not implemented feature in that bug report is everything you love about Microsoft-controlled “open source but not really”.

I’ve only ever printed code from BBEdit in the last couple decades, let’s see how other editors fare:

  • BBEdit: Perfect. Print command in menu (it’s a native Mac app!), prints headers, page & line numbers, nice margins. Looks perfect, like an old-timey print job. I should probably have switched from dark to light theme, but it’d be fine. ★★★★★
  • Geany: Print command, several settings in Preferences, prints headers, page & line numbers (in settings, choose either headers or page numbers at bottom, or it’ll be duplicated). Hideous non-native GTK app and dialogs, but does the job perfectly well. ★★★★½
  • MacVim: Print command, produces a postscript file which immediately opens in Preview, spins a while, converts to PDF. Default has no line numbers, add set popt=header:2,number:y to your .vimrc. ★★★½☆
  • Atom: No print command in the menu, but there’s multiple packages 5-6 years old, they work fine. Only shows line numbers, bad margins, it’s literally a web page being printed. ★★★☆☆
  • Sublime Text: Print command, but no settings (in the horrible JSON text editor where you do settings) to make it nice. Literally dumps a web page, no page or line numbers. What’s the least you could do and check off the feature? That’s how subl does everything. ★★☆☆☆
  • Xcode: Takes forever to start. Prints in grayscale, which is nice, but no headers or line numbers. Fail. ★★☆☆☆
  • Panic Nova: … My demo expired, and cleaning the configs out doesn’t let me try again, so who knows. Can’t even give them a second try without paying $100. Trashed.

I’d be interested in seeing how others fare, and on non-Mac platforms if they have any consistent print command.

Here’s a zip of PDF prints – maze2.py is a silly Python program, but at just 3 pages it’s a good test case.