15 Best Syntax Highlighter WordPress Plugins

December 25, 2010

You want nice looking code snippets in your WordPress based sites? There are many plugins to help you do that. We have asked our readers and our fellow bloggers what are the most popular WordPress syntax highlighting plugins and produced the list of top 15.

1. WP-Syntax

WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

2. jQuery.Syntax

jQuery.Syntax is an extremely fast and lightweight syntax highlighter. It has dynamic loading of syntax source files and integrates cleanly using CSS or modelines. It supports a large number of different programming languages.

This WordPress plugin provides syntax highlighting using jQuery.Syntax, supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports both block elements (pre) and inline elements (code) for highlighting.

3. wp-syntax-rettke

wp-syntax-rettke serves as an example for the programmatic “Advanced Configuration” of GeSHi in Ryan McGeary’s excellent WP-Syntax plugin.

4. WP-Syntax Download Extension

This plug-in makes WP-Syntax highlighted code snippets downloadable from nice captions.

5. Wp-Syntax Hacktify

A plugin allowing you to change the WP-Syntax code highlighting color scheme elegantly.

WP-Syntax rawks for writing about geeky stuff, but I want it more blacker. And I want a CSS file to hack instead of those icky and inefficient inline styles.

I got the basic idea from WP-Syntax-Colorizer but went further with an external CSS file.

6. WP-Syntax Editor Integration Plugin

This plugin will add a button to both the visual and HTML WordPress Editor panel allowing you to easily insert code for WP-Syntax. WP-Syntax is a syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress

7. WP-Syntax Colorizer

A plugin allowing you to easily set all the WP-Syntax color settings in one place and configure WP-Syntax to fit your theme.

8. Syntax Highlighter MT

This plugin works like many of the others that enable the use of the Syntax Highlighter tool. Dynamic plugin loading is now available as part of the Syntax Highlighter tool, making plugin configuration obsolete.

9. Syntax Highlighter Compress

Syntax Highlighter ComPress is a simple WordPress plugin, that is based on the latest Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter Script. Code and source text of different mark-up or programming languages can be highlighted in WordPress

10. SHJS Syntax Hilighter

Syntax hilight 30 languages, 2 dozen themes to choose from. Fast, can easily hilight 1000 lines of code (the Google Syntax Hilighter based plugins die around 75-100 lines).

2 ways to include code in your posts – use as documented on SHJS or use the [SyntaxHilite:…] syntax described in the installation/usage section to link to a raw text file.

Uses SHJS for syntax hilighting, simple hand-rolled JavaScript for line numbering.

11. Easy Google Syntax Highlighter

This plugin is an implementation of the Syntax Highlighter 2.1.364 by Alex Gorbatchev with a front end to allow configuring all the global settings that are available, such having the plugin automatically include languages to highlight, thereby improving page loading performance.