10 Best Text Highlighting Plugins In JavaScript (2023 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 Mar 16 2023

Table of contents:

• jQuery Text Highlighting Plugins
• Vanilla JS Text Highlighting Plugins

Best jQuery Text Highlighting Plugins

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.

[Demo] [Download]

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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.

[Demo] [Download]

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jQuery Plugin To Highlight Searched Text In A Certain Container - highlight.js

Just another text highlighting plugin that highlights matched text/words with custom styles in a specific container. useful in your search result page to highlight user searched terms.

[Demo] [Download]

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Animated jQuery Text Highlighting Plugin - Highlighter

A very small jQuery plugin which allows you to highlight specified words, sentences, terms with CSS3 powered animations.

[Demo] [Download]

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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.

[Demo] [Download]

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Best Vanilla JS Text Highlighting Libraries

Hightlight Content Selection For The Web – Web Highlighter

A pure JS web highlighter that makes it possible to highlight any content selection on the web.

[Demo] [Download]

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Progressive Text Highlighting Effect With Pure JavaScript – lumin

A small, zero-dependency JavaScript library used to progressively highlight text within a specific container.

[Demo] [Download]

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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.

[Demo] [Download]

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Highlight Text Within Textarea – texthighlighter.js

A responsive text highlighter plugin that makes it possible to highlight specific text within a textarea element.

[Demo] [Download]

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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.

[Demo] [Download]

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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.