Syntax-Highlighted Textareas with HTML and Javascript
As web applications
become increasingly smarter and powerful, we start to spend more time in
a browser window than in any other desktop application. MS
Office-replacement suites like Google
Apps, are first to come to mind, but
there are many other cool apps. Web-based collaboration is especially
web-centric. Wikis, blogs and community sites are all authored using
text-areas in a browser. In most cases a WYSIWYG editor is provided.
Geeks like us, however, prefer to mess with raw code (HTML?) directly.
Nice and dandy, but then you are stuck with boring black-on-white
listing. Or maybe not…
Codepress is an absolutely amazing Javascript library that provides syntax-highlighting for programming code, including the ones written on PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Java, Perl and SQL. It’s very solid and performance is great.
I must confess, back in 2003, I did try to create something similar but failed miserably. It was either because I did not have enough time or Javascript was not powerful enough, yet, or I was not that good at it, depending who use ask. Either way, I am double excited now to see that somebody else was able to deliver this very useful and much appreciated tool.
P.S. I am going to look-around if anybody has already integrated it into Drupal and if not - you bet it is going there ;)