10 Best Text Highlighting Plugins In JavaScript (2026 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 28 2026
Table of contents:
Best jQuery Text Highlighting Plugins
Performant Text Highlighting Plugin - advanced-mark.js
A fast and lightweight JavaScript library for highlighting characters, words, terms, phrases, and even text ranges on web pages.
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.
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.
Highlight Text In Contenteditable Elements With simpleHighlightTextarea jQuery Plugin
A lightweight jQuery plugin that lets you highlight text inside a contenteditable element using custom colors. This can be useful for interactive tutorials, annotations, or any content where you want to draw the user's attention to specific parts of the text.
Tiny jQuery Plugin To Highlight Text In Textarea
A simple, lightweight jQuery plugin which allows you to highlight text inside of textarea element using Regex or Array.
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.
Animated Handdrawn Text Annotation Library – Rough Notation
A fancy JavaScript library for annotating your text with animated, sketchy/hand-drawn styled graphics using Rough.js.
Progressively Highlight Text On Scroll Using CSS animation-timeline Property
A scroll-driven text highlighting effect that allows you to progressively highlight specific text wrapped in <mark> elements as users scroll down the page.
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.
