Codepress would have been a great tool, especially now when browsers are getting faster. Codepress is no longer under active development and therefore the links below may or may not work.
That said, you should totally checkout CodeMirror. CodeMirror powers jsfiddle, so it’s obviously powerful and likely what you’re looking for.
I was looking around for a way to edit code in a pretty way with highlighting in javascript. I found Codepress. It’s a solution for live text code editing which can be embedded inside of a textarea. It’s pretty neat but still needs work.
It offers a good number of options which include language support and line numbers to the wonderful benefit of syntax highlighting.
Codepress CSS Highlighting Demo
- 29 languages supported: PHP, Javascript, Java, Perl, SQL, HTML and CSS to just name a few. Plus a generic syntax style that probably will work for a wide array of things.
- Line numbers supported.
- Shift from codepress fancy editor to regular textarea with ease.
- Instead of textarea, pre tags will work too.
- Auto-complete features (untested).
- Read only option.
- Easy install?
I tried it and I have to admit it’s not as great as it could be. For instance, the demos on the homepage aren’t what is in the demo-page they have in the zip file. The entire thing isn’t cross-browser since it’s not powered by a javascript library. Because it’s not cross-browser, they didn’t bother to write their own either. So instead, it looks like it has four separate cores (webkit, opera, gecko and ie). Isn’t that great?
If you go to Codepress.org, you get nothing. I found this by typing codepress into google and getting someone’s extracted version! The zip file is still up on SourceForage though. I hate when these kind of projects go under though. It had merit. Ajaxian even posted about it in 2007, but nobody since said it has died.
I found another post on Peterbe.com about EditArea vs. Codepress which compared their features. The last thing I found was this on wikipedia comparing all of the major known javascript code editors. One of those needs a Mootools/jQuery port.