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highlightjs
highlight.js
JavaScript2011–2024
highlightjs / highlight.js

highlight.js

JavaScript syntax highlighter with language auto-detection and zero dependencies.

Web DevelopmentDeveloper ToolsLanguages & Compilers
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
25KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

JavaScript syntax highlighter with language auto-detection and zero dependencies.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-03-18 23:23:46 UTC to 2024-08-20 17:14:18 UTC.

0122011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

6 sources
mdaniel·Aug 20, 2024
https://github.com/pragtical/plugins/commit/54096a6461f5c034... makes me long for The One Grammar To Rule Them ™ I thought for a while that TextMate bundles[1] were that, especially since JetBrains[2], Linguist[3] and VSCode[4] honor them. However, in the spirit of "the good thing about standards ..." highlight.js does[5] almost the same thing that Pragtical does which makes me feel even worse I had high hopes for Tree-Sitter since it seems to have really won mindshare, but the idea of having an executable grammar spec[6] is ... well, no wonder it hasn't caught on outside of that specific ecosystem 1: https://github.com/rspec/rspec.tmbundle/blob/1.1.12/Syntaxes... 2: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/24... 3: https://github.com/github-linguist/linguist/blob/v7.30.0/lib... 4: https://github.com/microsoft/vscod
Read the rest
e-textmate 5: https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/11.10.0/src... 6: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/blob/v0.22.6/test...
In Pragtical: Practical and pragmatic code editor
civilian·Feb 20, 2015
At one point I got really into the idea of ASTs for languages. I've used pygments, the python syntax highlighter, with the intention of parsing the meaning of code. These syntax highlighters are great but I think that underlie the lack of a defined and accessible AST parse definition for most languages. Highlight.js and others kind of just rely regexes-- https://github.com/isagalaev/highlight.js/blob/master/src/la... It'd be great if we could parse through programming languages to get their meaning. I want to get tuples back! ``` a = 23 ``` would give (variable(name=a), assignedTo, number(23)) This does exist for some languages, but mostly compiled ones. But it would make the syntax highlighting even more robust! Antlr is the best one around at the moment. http://www.antlr.org/
In Highlight.js – Syntax highlighting for the Web

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