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Make yourself at home with HotChili

Syntax highlighting makes code structures pop up, puts order into the intricacies of a program, let’s you concentrate on the logical connections.

Chili does a great job. If you are a blog author, you can easily add syntax highlighting to your scripts, even if you have a very limited control on page generation. And Chili does offer you many configuration options, including the possibility to adapt color schemes at your taste. In fact, the CSS for a language is maybe the first thing Chili users change. They want their highlighting to suit their vision, they build a pattern that matches their engine.

HotChili is better. If you are a blog reader, you can easily* add syntax highlighting to scripts that are not yours, even if they are already highlighted. Pretty cool: you can adapt almost any script to your color scheme!!

* (two clicks)

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Chili 1.8c Released Today

UPDATE: Chili 1.9 has been released

Changes
  • Fixed the single chunk limitation. Now any element should be properly highlighted by Chili, even if it contains many chunks, even if it is already highlighted.
  • Updated the bundled jQuery library to version 1.1.3.1
  • Removed the examples from the distribution zip
  • Added a quick start guide, with a 3 steps Chili installation, all the examples, and a simple how-to for HotChili
Links
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Introducing HotChili

The rationale behind Chili is that I need highlighted code to understand a program listing. I developed Chili to make it really easy for every blogger to add highlighting to their own code snippets.

The rationale behind HotChili is that many sites still don’t use any highlighting at all, and that bothers me. I developed HotChili to make it really easy for every internet user to add highlighting to someone else’s code snippets.

HotChili is a Greasemonkey user script (plugin), so it runs on any FireFox browser with that extension installed. HotChili is very easy to install and easier to use. Just click on a dull snippet and spice it up by selecting a language off the popup menu. If you change your mind, click again and undo it. That’s all!!

Install HotChili

After installing HotChili, you can browse the web as usual. If you want to test it, here is a short list of good programming pages that lack any highlighting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …

As you see, HotChili is very simple to use and adds quite a readability factor to code. My advise is to turn it off during normal browsing, and turn it on when you really need it.