Completely unfair comparison of JavaScript syntax highlighters

softwaremaniacs.org

48 points·dchest··5 comments

The unfortunate thing about JS syntax highlighters, is that people reading your site via an RSS feed don't get the highlighting. On the other hand for some sites that isn't an issue.

I hate Javascript syntax highlighting. I have never seen a library that doesn't degrade horribly in cases like naming a variable x' ("x prime") in Haskell (or when merely quoting a symbol in Lisp). They also tend not to support Perl at all, and definitely don't highlight q{Foo} as a string.

My advice is to use Emacs or Vim to do your syntax highlighting. They highlight well enough to please people actually doing work, and when people get annoyed with the rules, they fix them.

http://search.cpan.org/~geoffr/Text-VimColor-0.11/lib/Text/V...

http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Text-EmacsColor-0.03/lib/Te...

Highlight.js does support Perl, does mark up q{...} as strings and has no problem with quoting in Lisp. I'm not sure about Haskell thing you mention because Haskell is a new contribution. But I'm sure it's fixable if it doesn't do the right thing.

You're probably talking about a hoard of simplistic regexp parsers. Highlight.js is not one of them, it's a proper context-aware parser.

http://ajaxorg.github.com/ace/build/editor.html is pretty sweet, real time text editor (many languages) with highlighting support.

See more info at http://ace.ajax.org/

GNU Source Highlight is an amazing thing.

Last time I tried, it mishandled xml elements containing hyphen. Only the part before the first hyphen was highlighted, the rest was just left as it was.

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