How to add Rich Text Editor to display code snippets

Question

Im working on a Rails based application where I have the need to allow the user to format the text he enters and I would also like a way to highlight code snippets the way Stackoverflow does when I enter a code snippet.

Are there any plugins that do this.

And I would also like to know which is the RTE that is recommended and would be unobtrusive. I see a lot of recommendations for FCKEditor but how do I implement the code snippets

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It seems like you might need something lighterweight than CKeditor. If you do choose to use CKeditor, I would use a rails plugin to install it. I use this one :

http://github.com/galetahub/rails-ckeditor

The directions are very straightforward on the git.

As for Syntax Highlighting , I recommend :

• The GitHub crew loves Pygments. They are using it on many different places, including Jekyll and GitHub itself. The downside is that it's a python library so you would need to install python and execute it as a shell task.

• Syntax Highlighter, jQuery Library <-- The easiest to implement

  http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/

• Rails3 has these plugins :

  Ruby offers 3 code highlighting Gems: Ultraviolet, Syntax and CodeRay. AFAIK, the last one is the most adopted.