Companies Using Pygments

Mostly software companies and open-source projects that build documentation with Sphinx, which highlights code with Pygments. 36 of a random 38 domains we loaded on 14 November 2026 were Sphinx builds. Named users include AMD's ROCm docs, Confluent, Mozilla's Firefox source docs, Boston Dynamics' Spot SDK and Yubico's product documentation.

Our November 2026 crawl counts 1,813 domains that link a pygments.css stylesheet, after removing 33 duplicate entries, and 611 of them match a company. They aren't customers: Pygments is a free library, and 311 of the domains are Read the Docs projects, many with no company behind them. Since tracking began on 16 March 2026, 70 domains dropped the stylesheet.

0.1% of Developer Tooling at TechnologyChecker.io, 21st in the category, with 1,813 domains. Webpack (38.18%), Babel (20.68%) and Turbopack (18.84%) lead it. Those are front-end build tools that ship inside many sites' code, while Pygments only shows on documentation built with it, so the comparison is loose.

Other syntax highlighters: highlight.js and Prism, which run in the browser; Rouge, the Ruby highlighter that Jekyll uses by default; and Chroma, the Go highlighter Hugo uses. In our Developer Tooling category the biggest rows are build tools such as Webpack (699,804 domains) and Babel (379,086), which don't highlight code.

By matched companies: the United States (202), Germany (48), the United Kingdom (31), France (26), Canada (22) and Switzerland (20). These cover the 611 domains we matched to a company. Many Read the Docs projects have no company and no country, so the list leans toward firms with their own docs subdomain.

Small, mostly. 56.61% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees, 26.61% have 11 to 50 and 12.37% have 51 to 200. Only 7 have more than 1,000 staff, among them AMD, whose ROCm documentation is a Sphinx build that links the stylesheet.

Mostly founded in the 2010s: 55.32% of matched companies with a founding year started then, 19.62% in the 2020s and 18.2% in the 2000s. Only 6.86% predate 2000. That fits a list of software firms and developer-tool makers that publish API and SDK documentation.

On our data, a software company with 1 to 10 staff in the US, Germany or the UK, founded in the 2010s, that publishes developer documentation built with Sphinx on a docs. subdomain or on Read the Docs, usually with Font Awesome and jQuery from its docs theme.

Pygments is a generic syntax highlighter for code hosting, forums, wikis and other apps that need to show source code, per pygments.org. It supports 602 languages and text formats and outputs HTML, RTF, LaTeX and ANSI. On the web its biggest user is Sphinx, which runs it while building documentation: 36 of our 38 sampled sites.

Run pip install Pygments; it is on the Python Package Index. The current version is 2.21.0, released on 17 August 2026 per PyPI, and the Pygments FAQ says it needs only a standard Python install. Sphinx 9.2.0 lists Pygments 2.19 or later as a requirement, so documentation projects get it automatically.

Within Python there's no close rival; most Python tools that colour code, Sphinx among them, call Pygments. The alternatives sit in other languages: Rouge in Ruby, Chroma in Go, and highlight.js or Prism in the browser. Pygments is BSD-licensed, per PyPI, so there's rarely a licence reason to switch.

From the command line: pygmentize -f html /path/to/file.py prints the file as highlighted HTML, per the Pygments FAQ. To make a stylesheet, its command-line docs give pygmentize -f html -S colorful -a .syntax, which writes CSS for the colorful style. A pygments.css file on a site is that kind of output.

Because Jekyll's default highlighter, Rouge, is compatible with Pygments stylesheets, per Jekyll's documentation, so some themes ship a file with that name. Pygments itself isn't involved there. In our random sample of 38, no domain was a Jekyll site; 36 were Sphinx builds, where Pygments does the highlighting.

Look in the page source for a stylesheet named pygments.css, usually at _static/pygments.css on Sphinx sites, and for code wrapped in a div with the class highlight. Then check the generator: Sphinx pages load _static/documentation_options.js. On a Jekyll page, the same file name means Rouge did the highlighting.