I like Andrea Ercolino's chili syntax highlighter. I like it because it works well with jQuery, it allows me to use the HTML5 <code class="language-whatever"> notation for determining language, and I can highlight inline elements, not just pre elements. And Andrea has been very responsive to my questions.

But it has an annoying habit of being too clever about cutting and pasting: selecting text in marked-up pre elements evidently used to cause problems in Firefox, so chili detects the mousedown when you try to select and creates a pop-up box with plain text instead. Unfortunately, it just gets in the way and the text is no longer formatted correctly. And the problem only exists for code with line numbers, which I never use.

So I modified the code in file jquery.chili.js: I turned the function fixTextSelection (line 1097 in my copy) into a no-op by adding a return; at the beginning. Now select and copy/paste work correctly in Firefox. It may be broken in Internet Explorer, but that doesn't bother me: my whole blog theme breaks in Internet Explorer. That's a feature, not a bug :) .

There still are some problems; it loads styles and scripts dynamically and if there's a lot happening on a page the syntax highlighter tends to lose race conditions and nothing happens. I may look at Benjamin Lupton's jQuery syntaxhighlighter or JUSH or make my own (in my copious free time).

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