Most often than not, when working with articles or posts, there’s usually a need to insert code snippets in a blog post. Here we are listing some best syntax highlighter plugins to display code snippets properly in your article. This introduction begs the question what are syntax highlighters plugins?
Syntax highlighter plugins help you to customise the codes that you want to add in your post or pages. Syntax Highlighter Plugins have the power to highlight specific code sections so it does not look messy with other text. Below is a list of the best syntax highlighter WordPress plugins that you can use in your next website:
1. Crayon Syntax Highlighter
Crayon Syntax Highlighter is in all cases one of the best and mostly used syntax highlighter WordPress plugin which supports multiple languages, themes, and fonts. Crayon Syntax Highlighter allows you to change various configurations and settings. Once it’s installed you can customise the setting because it has an integrated theme editor. Crayon syntax highlighter is equally compatible with visual & HTML editor. Using the plugin, you can either highlight an URL, or WordPress post text and you can also mark the important lines.
Below are the top features:
- Toggled plain code
- Toggled line numbers
- Copy/paste code
- Open code in a new window (popup)
- Line wrapping
- Code expanding
- bbPress 2 support
- Mixed Language Highlighting in a single Crayon
- tag support, option to use setting-value in the class attribute
- Valid HTML 5 markup
- Mouse event interaction (showing plain code on double click, toolbar on mouseover)
- Tab sizes
- Code title
- Retina buttons
- Striped lines
- File extension detection
- Live Preview in settings
2. Enlighter – Customizable Syntax Highlighter
Enlighter is an another excellent plugin for display beautiful code-appearance in your WordPress website. This is easy-to-use and customizable syntax highlighting tool for WordPress by which you can easily bind up your code with shortcode. A Theme-Customizer with live preview mode is included to modify the built-in themes. Enlighter also supports the automatic creation of tab-panes to display code-groups together like html+css+js
The top features include:
- Inline Syntax Highlighting
- Markdown fenced code blocks
- Shortcodes within content, comments, and widgets
- Easy to use Text-Editor mode through the use of Shortcodes and QuickTags
- Advanced configuration options (CDN usage, ..) are available within the options page.
- Supports code-groups (displays multiple code-blocks within a tab-pane)
- Extensible language and theme engines – add your own one.
- Standalone Shortcode-Processor to avoid wpautop filter issues in Text-Editor Mode
- Webfont Loader to add missing Monospace Fonts to your website
3. WP-Syntax
WP-Syntax is another famous syntax highlighter WordPress plugin which provides clean syntax highlighting feature This plugin using GeSHi and supporting a wide range of popular languages. It also supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.
4. SyntaxHighlighter
SyntaxHighlighter Evolved is a very famous plugin developed by Automattic. Unlike any other syntax highlighter plugins, SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post highlighted code to your site without losing its formatting or making any manual changes. After the successful activation of this plugins,you can wrap your code in [language], such as [php]code here[/php] or [css]code here[/css]\
5. iG:Syntax Hiliter
iG:Syntax Hiliter plugin allows you to post source code to your WordPress website with syntax highlighting and formatting as seen in code editors, IDEs. You just copy and paste the code from the code editor or IDE and this plugin will take care of all the code colouring and preserve your formatting. This plugin uses the GeSHi library to colourize your code and supports over 100 programming languages. This plugin recommended using a cache plugin for fast results and less load on your server. In this way, the plugin won’t have to parse the code blocks on a post every time it’s loaded in a browser.