CodeMirror vs highlight.js

Overview

CodeMirror

Stacks747

Followers232

Votes15

highlight.js

Stacks547

Followers31

Votes0

GitHub Stars24.7K

Forks3.7K

CodeMirror vs highlight.js: What are the differences?

1. Language Support: CodeMirror supports a wide range of programming languages, including popular ones such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, and Java. On the other hand, highlight.js offers support for a similarly extensive set of languages, with a focus on web-related languages and markup languages like XML and JSON.
2. Size: CodeMirror is a relatively large library that provides a complete and feature-rich text editor experience. It offers advanced features like autocompletion, linting, and syntax highlighting, which contribute to its larger size. In contrast, highlight.js is a lightweight library focused solely on syntax highlighting, making it significantly smaller in size.
3. Extensibility: CodeMirror provides a highly extensible framework that allows developers to create custom functionality, such as new language modes or plugins, to enhance the editor's capabilities. It offers a rich API for customization and integration with external tools. On the contrary, highlight.js is less extensible and primarily designed for straightforward syntax highlighting with limited customization options.
4. Rendering: CodeMirror utilizes a code editing component that provides a fully interactive and editable editing experience, including features like line numbers, indentation, and code folding. It is suitable for scenarios where code editing or manipulation is required. In contrast, highlight.js focuses on syntax highlighting only and renders code snippets as static HTML, making it more suitable for scenarios where the code is primarily for display purposes.
5. Browser Support: CodeMirror is designed to work across a wide range of browsers and has extensive browser compatibility. It ensures consistent behavior and functionality across different platforms. On the other hand, highlight.js also has good browser support but does not offer the same level of consistency and compatibility as CodeMirror in certain edge cases or older browser versions.
6. Ease of Use: CodeMirror provides a comprehensive and feature-rich editor, which results in a steeper learning curve for beginners. It offers powerful functionality but requires more effort to configure and integrate into web applications. In comparison, highlight.js is relatively easier to set up and use, making it more suitable for simple syntax highlighting requirements without advanced editing features.

In Summary, CodeMirror and highlight.js differ in their language support, size, extensibility, rendering capabilities, browser support, and ease of use. CodeMirror is a comprehensive and feature-rich text editor with extensive language support, whereas highlight.js is a lightweight syntax highlighting library suitable for simpler requirements.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

CodeMirror	highlight.js
CodeMirror is a JavaScript component that provides a code editor in the browser. When a mode is available for the language you are coding in, it will color your code, and optionally help with indentation.	It works in the browser as well as on the server. It works with pretty much any markup, doesn’t depend on any framework, and has automatic language detection.
Support for over 60 languages out of the box;A powerful, composable language mode system;Autocompletion (XML);Code folding;Configurable keybindings;Vim, Emacs, and Sublime Text bindings;Search and replace interface;Bracket and tag matching;Support for split views;Linter integration;Mixing font sizes and styles;Various themes;Able to resize to fit content;Inline and block widgets;Programmable gutters;Making ranges of text styled, read-only, or atomic;Bi-directional text support	Import Highlight.js as a CommonJS-module; The default import imports all languages; Custom Initialization
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 24.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.7K
Stacks 747	Stacks 547
Followers 232	Followers 31
Votes 15	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Integrable in your application 4 Better content manipulation methods 3 Easy Custom Mode 1 JavaScript based 1 Easy setup	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Google Chrome Sublime Text Opera Browser Safari Vim Emacs Firefox	AngularJS Node.js JavaScript

What are some alternatives to CodeMirror, highlight.js?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

Related Comparisons

CodeMirror vs highlight.js: What are the differences?

1. Language Support: CodeMirror supports a wide range of programming languages, including popular ones such as JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, and Java. On the other hand, highlight.js offers support for a similarly extensive set of languages, with a focus on web-related languages and markup languages like XML and JSON.
2. Size: CodeMirror is a relatively large library that provides a complete and feature-rich text editor experience. It offers advanced features like autocompletion, linting, and syntax highlighting, which contribute to its larger size. In contrast, highlight.js is a lightweight library focused solely on syntax highlighting, making it significantly smaller in size.
3. Extensibility: CodeMirror provides a highly extensible framework that allows developers to create custom functionality, such as new language modes or plugins, to enhance the editor's capabilities. It offers a rich API for customization and integration with external tools. On the contrary, highlight.js is less extensible and primarily designed for straightforward syntax highlighting with limited customization options.
4. Rendering: CodeMirror utilizes a code editing component that provides a fully interactive and editable editing experience, including features like line numbers, indentation, and code folding. It is suitable for scenarios where code editing or manipulation is required. In contrast, highlight.js focuses on syntax highlighting only and renders code snippets as static HTML, making it more suitable for scenarios where the code is primarily for display purposes.
5. Browser Support: CodeMirror is designed to work across a wide range of browsers and has extensive browser compatibility. It ensures consistent behavior and functionality across different platforms. On the other hand, highlight.js also has good browser support but does not offer the same level of consistency and compatibility as CodeMirror in certain edge cases or older browser versions.
6. Ease of Use: CodeMirror provides a comprehensive and feature-rich editor, which results in a steeper learning curve for beginners. It offers powerful functionality but requires more effort to configure and integrate into web applications. In comparison, highlight.js is relatively easier to set up and use, making it more suitable for simple syntax highlighting requirements without advanced editing features.

CodeMirror vs highlight.js

Overview