syntax highlighting in the terminal with pygments

the Pygments syntax highlighting library comes with a CLI tool 'pygmentize', which has a formatter for terminal color codes:

pygmentize -f terminal hello.coffee

you can pipe it into less to paginate output:

pygmentize -f terminal hello.coffee | less -R

and then set an alias for dead-simple CLI usage (example is for zsh):

pretty() { pygmentize -f terminal "$1" | less -R }

you can also use the 'terminal256' formatter for a 256 color terminal.