10 Best Text Highlighting Plugins In JavaScript (2024 Update)
A text highlighting plugin enables you to highlight characters, words, terms, sentences, or event paragraphs within any content.
This can be useful in highlighting search keywords in search results, marking up emphasized text within paragraphs, or marking text in the notes using different colors.
In this post, we're going to introduce you 10 best free jQuery and Vanilla JavaScript text highlighting plugins that make it simple to highlight part of your text block on the client side. Feel free to download and use them in your next project.
Originally Published Oct 08 2020, updated Feb 22 2024
Table of contents:
Best jQuery Text Highlighting Plugins
Progressively Highlight Text Within An Article - jQuery Marker Animation
A jQuery plugin for creating marker animations that progressively highlight specified text when they become visible within the viewport.
Fast Word Highlighting Plugin - jQuery.Highlight.js
A small, customizable, performant text highlighter that applies custom styles and HTML tags to matched strings or words inside a specific container.
Versatile Keyword Highlighting Plugin For jQuery - mark.js
mark.js is a jQuery plugin that allows to highlight/mark searched text within a specific container.
Highlight Matching Content As The User Types - jQuery filteringHighlight
A jQuery Plugin to target and highlight matching keyword terms as the user is typing in a search field.
jQuery Plugin To Highlight Text In Text Fields - highlightTextarea
A jQuery plugin used to highlight text (words, sentences, strings, etc...) defined in a JS array object for your text fields like textarea and input.
Best Vanilla JS Text Highlighting Libraries
Highlight Text Within Textarea – texthighlighter.js
A responsive text highlighter plugin that makes it possible to highlight specific text within a textarea element.
Text Annotation And Highlighting Library – Annotate.js
A mobile-friendly text annotation JavaScript library that allows you to highlight text and attach notes (comments) to it.
Easy JavaScript Plugin For Word Highlighting In The Document – mark.js
A lightweight and easy-to-use JavaScript library used for highlighting specified words/strings/phrases in the selected element. Good for search keyword highlighting in your search result page.
Highlight And Replace Text In JavaScript – HR.js
A lightweight, Pure JavaScript library that enables you to highlight and replace specified character(s) within your text.
Underline/Highlight/Strike Text With The textAnnotator Library
A simple-to-use JavaScript plugin that allows you to create and manage text annotations with just a few lines of code. It currently supports underlining, highlighting, and striking out text, as well as annotating the selected text.
More Resources:
Seeking more jQuery plugins or JavaScript libraries to highlight text within the document? See jQuery Text Highlighting and JavaScript Highlight sections for more details.
