Let’s you click on a colorless code listing and highlight its syntax, with a little bit of luck. Works with CSS, XHTML, JavaScript, MySQL, and PHP. Easy to customize and expand supported languages. Based on Chili, which is based on jQuery.
Rationale
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 Hot Chili is that many sites still don’t use any highlighting at all, and that bothers me. I developed Hot Chili to make it really easy for every internet user to add highlighting to someone else’s code snippets.
How to install and use
Hot Chili needs FireFox and GreaseMonkey and 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!!
The user script downloads jQuery, Chili, and Hot Chili each time you browse to a page. You could reduce the burden by using one of the other two modes: system or local; or by checking it off when you don’t need it.
Examples
If you want to test it, here is a short list of good programming pages that lack any highlighting:
- Yahoo User Interface blog (YUI)
- MySQL site
- O’Reilly Network resources
- Douglas Crockford’s resources
- Fluffy Cat’s resources
- Greasemonkey Userscripts: a script that the default highlighter cannot treat
- Tizag resources: a script already highlighted
As you see, Hot Chili is very simple to use and adds quite a readability factor to code.
Some commentaries
- http://forum.mambo-foundation.org/showthread.php?t=6446
- ChuckTrukk: You may have seen it. It’s a greasemonkey script and works great. It’s great while surfing pages and finding scripts
- cauld: Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.
- Elpie: I was reluctant to try as I had problems with my last install of Greasemonkey, but the latest version seems to be running ok and HotChili is a really nice addon. Thanks for sharing Chuck.