A syntax highlighter enables you to beautify your code and make it readable to your website visitors. There are plenty of jQuery Syntax Highlighter plugins out there which can format your code and color them according to the languages used.
It doesn’t matter whether you are using PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP or any other language; there is always a syntax highlighter out there which can beautify your code to make it distinctive and elegant.
Below you will find 15 Best jQuery Syntax Highlighters which can prettify your code and gear up your work flow.
1. Highlight.js
Highlight.js highlights syntax in code examples on blogs, forums and, in fact, on any web page. It’s very easy to use because it works automatically: finds blocks of code, detects a language, and highlights it.
This plugin has support for 71 languages and 44 styles, includes automatic language detection, Multilanguage code highlighting, works with any markup compatible with any JS framework and available for node.js
Demo & Download
2. Chili
Chili is the jQuery code highlighter plugin, it is very fast highlighting, fully customizable and provides fine control over which elements get highlighted by means of jQuery selector or the mythical jQuery chainability.
Chili also supports JavaScript regular expressions, including backreferences, and cross browser compatibility.
Demo & Download
3. SyntaxHighlighter
SyntaxHighlighter is a fully functional self-contained code syntax highlighter developed in JavaScript. SyntaxHighlighter is the client side highlighter for the web and web-apps! It’s been around since 2004 and it’s used virtually everywhere to seamlessly highlight code for presentation purposes.
SyntaxHighlighter is currently used and has been used in the past by Microsoft, Apache, Mozilla, Yahoo, WordPress, Bug Labs, Freshbooks and many many other companies and blogs.
Demo & Download
4. Modern Syntax Highlighter
This plugin allows you to easily post any markup to your site without losing its formatting and also can apply up to 43 modern theme to your markup, it can highlight post comments, it is highly customizable and has both global settings and per code settings.
Demo & Download
5. Prism
Prism is a new lightweight, extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind. It’s a spin-off from Dabblet and is tested there daily by thousands. Prism is only 2kb, very fast to extend without modifying the code, highlights embedded languages, inline code as well.
It doesn’t force you to use any Prism-specific markup, not even a Prism-specific class name, only standard markup you should be using anyway. So, you can just try it for a while, remove it if you don’t like it and leave no traces behind.
Demo & Download
6. Rainbow
Rainbow is a code syntax highlighting library written in JavaScript. It was designed to be lightweight (1.4kb), easy to use, and extendable.
It is completely themable via CSS. Rainbow on its own is very simple. It goes through code blocks, processes regex patterns, and wraps matching patterns in tags. All the theming is left up to CSS.
Demo & Download
7. jQuery FocusOn
jQuery FocusOn is a plugin that makes your clients fully focus on a certain area of your web site, it receives an element and will highlight the area of that element an make everything else opaque and disabled for clicking.
Demo & Download
8. jQuery Litelighter
jQuery Litelighter provides super light weight syntax highlighting for jQuery and Zepto. The goal of jQuery Litelighter is to provide an extremely lightweight, but elegant syntax highlight to many languages.
Demo & Download
9. SHJS
SHJS is a JavaScript program which highlights source code passages in HTML documents. Documents using SHJS are highlighted on the client side by the web browser. SHJS uses language definitions from GNU Source-highlight. This gives SHJS the ability to highlight source code written in many different languages.
Demo & Download
10. Beauty of Code
This jQuery syntax highlighter plugin uses Alex Gorbatchev’sSyntaxHighlighter but with a twist: produces more xhtml-compliant codes.
Demo & Download
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11. Lighter
Lighter is a free syntax highlighting class developed for MooTools. It was created with the MooTools developer in mind and takes advantage of many of the Framework’s features. Using it can be as simple as adding a single script to your webpage, selecting the elements you wish to highlight, and Lighter takes care of the rest.
Demo & Download
12. microlight
microlight.js is a tiny library (2.2k minified) which improves readability of code snippets by highlighting, for any programming language, without attaching additional language packages or styles.
Unlike other code-highlighting solutions, microlight.js does not keep a set of rules for many languages. Instead it uses a general highlighting strategy providing a reasonable highlight for most of them. In fact, microlight.js does not care about what language the code is written in, nor does it care about the code structure. It just goes through the code and highlights.
Demo & Download
13. Enlighter.js
EnlighterJS is a free, easy-to-use, syntax highlighting plugin developed for MooTools. Using it can be as simple as adding a single script and style to your website, choosing the elements you wish to highlight, and EnlighterJS takes care of the rest!
Demo & Download
14. JavaScript Syntax Highlighter
JavaScript Syntax Highlighter can be used for client-side syntax highlighting of following languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, HTTP and SMTP protocol, php.ini and Apache config. It highlights languages embedded into each other, links to documentation of all languages, recognize complete PHP Syntax, and works in all major browsers.
Demo & Download
15. Code Prettify
This is another syntax highlighting scrip that makes source-code snippets in HTML prettier. This comes under Apache license 2.0.
Demo & Download
Final Words
Syntax highlighters are necessary if you are sharing some code with your audience, it doesn’t matter whether you have organized and wrapped the code elegantly as it always difficult to identify the code without syntax highlighter. We have mentioned some of the best syntax highlighter plugins which include some of the best features to beautify your code easily. Let us know which one is your favorite by posting a comment below.
