Prism vs highlight.js

Overview

highlight.js

Stacks547

Followers31

Votes0

GitHub Stars24.7K

Forks3.7K

Prism

Stacks1.1K

Followers58

Votes0

GitHub Stars12.8K

Forks1.4K

Prism vs highlight.js: What are the differences?

Rendering Support: Prism supports rendering code with a range of supported languages and syntaxes, providing syntax highlighting and code formatting for a variety of programming and markup languages. On the other hand, highlight.js supports a similar range of languages and syntaxes but with a different set of supported languages and may have varying levels of language support compared to Prism, depending on the specific language or syntax in question.
Bundle Size: When it comes to bundle size, Prism is generally lighter and more modular compared to highlight.js. It provides a way to load only the necessary language modules or plugins required for a specific web page, reducing the overall file size and optimizing performance. On the other hand, highlight.js tends to have a larger default bundle size, including all supported languages and syntaxes.
API Flexibility: Prism offers a flexible and extensible API, allowing developers to easily customize and extend its functionality by creating new components or plugins. It provides a well-documented API that can be easily integrated into existing web projects. While highlight.js also provides some level of API flexibility, Prism's API is generally considered to be more robust and developer-friendly.
Syntax Highlighting Accuracy: In terms of syntax highlighting accuracy, Prism generally excels by providing more precise and reliable syntax highlighting, especially for complex or less-common languages and syntaxes. It ensures a more accurate representation of code and helps in understanding the code structure and logic. On the other hand, while highlight.js also offers decent syntax highlighting, it may have occasional inaccuracies or limitations with certain languages or syntaxes.
Theme Customization: Both Prism and highlight.js provide support for theming, allowing developers to customize the appearance and style of the highlighted code. However, Prism provides a more comprehensive theming system with greater control over various code elements, such as line numbers, backgrounds, and highlighting colors. This makes it easier to create visually appealing and consistent code highlighting across different web pages or projects.
Browser Compatibility: When it comes to browser compatibility, both Prism and highlight.js are well-maintained and regularly updated, ensuring compatibility with various modern browsers. However, Prism has better support for newer browser features and provides more consistent rendering across different browsers. It also offers better responsiveness and performance on mobile devices.

In summary, Prism and highlight.js differ in terms of rendering support, bundle size, API flexibility, syntax highlighting accuracy, theme customization options, and browser compatibility.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

highlight.js	Prism
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.	It is a lightweight, beautiful and extensible syntax highlighter, built with modern web standards in mind. It’s used in thousands of websites, including some of those you visit daily.
Import Highlight.js as a CommonJS-module; The default import imports all languages; Custom Initialization	Dead simple;Intuitive;Light as a feather;Blazing fast
Statistics
GitHub Stars 24.7K	GitHub Stars 12.8K
GitHub Forks 3.7K	GitHub Forks 1.4K
Stacks 547	Stacks 1.1K
Followers 31	Followers 58
Votes 0	Votes 0
Integrations
AngularJS Node.js JavaScript	Drupal React WordPress Angular Typo3 HTML5

What are some alternatives to highlight.js, Prism?

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.

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

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.

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Related Comparisons

Prism vs highlight.js: What are the differences?

Rendering Support: Prism supports rendering code with a range of supported languages and syntaxes, providing syntax highlighting and code formatting for a variety of programming and markup languages. On the other hand, highlight.js supports a similar range of languages and syntaxes but with a different set of supported languages and may have varying levels of language support compared to Prism, depending on the specific language or syntax in question.
Bundle Size: When it comes to bundle size, Prism is generally lighter and more modular compared to highlight.js. It provides a way to load only the necessary language modules or plugins required for a specific web page, reducing the overall file size and optimizing performance. On the other hand, highlight.js tends to have a larger default bundle size, including all supported languages and syntaxes.
API Flexibility: Prism offers a flexible and extensible API, allowing developers to easily customize and extend its functionality by creating new components or plugins. It provides a well-documented API that can be easily integrated into existing web projects. While highlight.js also provides some level of API flexibility, Prism's API is generally considered to be more robust and developer-friendly.
Syntax Highlighting Accuracy: In terms of syntax highlighting accuracy, Prism generally excels by providing more precise and reliable syntax highlighting, especially for complex or less-common languages and syntaxes. It ensures a more accurate representation of code and helps in understanding the code structure and logic. On the other hand, while highlight.js also offers decent syntax highlighting, it may have occasional inaccuracies or limitations with certain languages or syntaxes.
Theme Customization: Both Prism and highlight.js provide support for theming, allowing developers to customize the appearance and style of the highlighted code. However, Prism provides a more comprehensive theming system with greater control over various code elements, such as line numbers, backgrounds, and highlighting colors. This makes it easier to create visually appealing and consistent code highlighting across different web pages or projects.
Browser Compatibility: When it comes to browser compatibility, both Prism and highlight.js are well-maintained and regularly updated, ensuring compatibility with various modern browsers. However, Prism has better support for newer browser features and provides more consistent rendering across different browsers. It also offers better responsiveness and performance on mobile devices.

In summary, Prism and highlight.js differ in terms of rendering support, bundle size, API flexibility, syntax highlighting accuracy, theme customization options, and browser compatibility.

Prism vs highlight.js

Overview