CodePasta, our non-corporate, lightweight alternative to Pastebin

Pastebin has long been the go-to platform for code sharing, as well as sharing other types of text-based content. Pastebin has felt bloated and a bit antiquated for a long time though. Other services like Pastie came along which was a favourite among developers and techies but with the death of Pastie came no real alternative to take its place. This is why we built CodePasta.

The goal was to create a spiritual imitation of Pastie, a new lightweight code sharing platform with syntax highlighting support for every language in the book. What was also important to us was, keeping in line with the HTML Pasta motto, was ensuring fast load times. Unfortunately, code highlighting editors tend to take quite a bit of resources and slow down page loads significantly because they do so much work and it is always more noticeable on slower machines.

Our solution to this was to pre-compile the code highlighting and serve it to your statically, which sped up load times immensely, particularly for very large pastes. The beauty of our version of this solution is that unlike some other platforms which have a disconnect between the front-side code highlighting and the backend highlighting, our highlighting engine all works from the same system, thus it is consistent. This currently comes with some caveats, however, as with this system we don't have the ability to allow users to pick different editor themes. A solution for this is in the works, however.

We are also working on a few other features for CodePasta that don't exist on other platforms. So stay tuned. We'd love to hear your suggestions and ideas on what we can do to improve in the comments below.