Turn Any Textarea Into A Markup Editor Using markItUp! ...It's FREE

markItUp! is a JavaScript plugin built on the jQuery library. It allows you to turn any textarea into a markup editor. Html, Textile, Wiki Syntax, Markdown, BBcode or even your own Markup system can be easily implemented.

markItUp! is not meant to be a “Full-Features-Out-of-the-Box”-editor. Instead it is a very lightweight, customizable and flexible engine made to meet the developer's needs in their CMSes, blogs, forums or websites. markItUp! is not a WYSIWYG editor, and it never will be.

Features

Fast and unobtrusive integration : markItUp! is easy to integrate in existing or new projects, because it can turn any ordinary textarea field into a powerful quicktag editor with just 2 extra lines of code. The integration is unobtrusive, so your HTML will remain clean and semantic, and it degrades gracefully for users without JavaScript.

Support for keyboard shortcuts : markItUp! is easy to use. You can define your favorite keyboard shortcuts and use familiar keyboard  combinations for a user-friendly experience and effective manipulation of text and selections.

Toolbar and drop down menus : markItUp! allows you to set your buttons in a clear toolbar with convenient drop down menus.

Fully customizable and scriptable : You can add any markup and buttons you need with any styling you like. Callback functions allow for complex scripts and macros.

Editor's features callable from any place : You can trigger markItUp! features from anywhere in your page. You can quickly insert text or tags from other plugins or picture/media/link libraries.

Ajax dynamic preview : With the use of Ajax, you can let markItUp! render a live preview of your markups via any server-side parser you want. The preview can be opened in a new window or in a built-in iframe updated automagically, to reflect any changes in the editor.

Customizable Skins : Using CSS, you can skin the markItUp! editor to fit the look & feel of your application or website.

markItUp! is released under both the MIT and GPL Open Source licenses. In short, this means that markItUp! is totally Free, and you can do whatever you want with it. You are only obligated to keep the credits in place.

Regarding the jQuery, it's powerful javascript library. I initially used script.aculo.us for SmashingFeeds.com and later on i moved to jQuery. However script.aculo.us is easy to use compared to jQuery.