Today I tried to get Chili to work on this blog. I post code occasionally and Chili was appealing to me since it uses jQuery for most of the heavy lifting. I was hopeful that Chili would be quick and incrementally increase the amount of JavaScript downloaded. Chili didn’t work for me. It had syntax errors in the JavaScript. My debugging skills were not finding any quick answers so I decided to give plan SyntaxHighlighter a try.
From the post it looked like SyntaxHighlighter was going to be a bear to install so I decided to check the WordPress plugins web site for possible alternatives. Guess what I found, SyntaxHighlighter-Plus! This recently updated plugin uses the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev and makes installing a syntax highlighter a snap. The instructions are a little sparse on how to use it but I converted several existing code snippets to use the plugin. They looked good after I figured out how to get around the automatic encoding of HTML entities. The first time the editor encodes those special characters it was nice. The less than character becomes <. The second time it encodes the characters, it created a mess. The less than character becomes &lt;. I guess I should turn off the visual editor again. I also had to hand tune the CSS to get around some alignment issues.
Overall I give the plugin a thumbs up based on ease of installation and the light load it added, ~25K bytes. Editing a post is still a problem but I can work around that problem.
Javascript Code Highlighter: Chili vs SyntaxHighlighter :: PseudoCoder.com