Making Inline Code Printing Pretty

Question

I have to include small code snippets like method and class names within continuous text. I do not want to display those snippets as complete seperated listings, they should be displayed inline, similar to the option this site offers with backticks.

But let's face it, the options that are available out of the box are just plain ugly.

What I have in mind is the notation GitHub (and many other sites) use:

So, in particular:

• rounded corners
• contrastring border color
• different background color
• fixed width code font
• pretty (vertical) alignment within the text

I found many options to draw boxes around text (fancybox, colorbox, mdframed and others) but none of those packages seemed to be capable to fulfill all of my requirements (then again, I'm not really a LaTeX expert).

So the question is: How can we make inline code pretty?

Answer 1

Is this what you're looking for?

Output

Code

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}

\newcommand\code[1]{
  \tikz[baseline=(s.base)]{
    \node(s)[rounded corners,fill=orange!20,draw=gray]{\texttt{#1}};
  }
}

\begin{document}

Further, lists can be turned into \textcolor{blue}{Task Lists} 
by prefacing list items with \code{[ ]} or \code{[x]} (incomplete or complete,
respectively.

\end{document}

---

Update

A slight improvement of the \code macro, to ensure uniform height and depth of the box regardless of the height/depth of its content. Also, the improved macro \codex admits an optional argument.

\newcommand\codex[2][]{
    \tikz[baseline=(s.base)]{
        \node(s)[
            rounded corners,
            fill=blue!5,        % background color
            draw=gray,          % border of box
            text=gray!50!black, % text color
            inner xsep =3pt,    % horizontal space between text and border
            inner ysep =0pt,    % vertical space between text and border
            text height=2ex,    % height of box
            text depth =1ex,    % depth of box
            #1                  % other options
        ]{\texttt{#2}};
    }
}

Compare the output of \code and the improved version \codex

\code{aaaa} \code{bbbb} \code{ffff} \code{gggg} \code{<code>\textbackslash code</code>}

\codex{aaaa} \codex{bbbb} \codex{ffff} \codex{gggg} \codex{<code>\textbackslash code</code>}