GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project. GeSHi aims to be a simple but powerful highlighting class, with the following goals:

   * Support for a wide range of popular languages
   * Easy to add a new language for highlighting
   * Highly customisable output formats

GeSHi aims to do this all as quickly as possible. Many customisable features of GeSHi facilitate speed increases, and you can easily find a balance between the amount of highlighting done and the speed in which it is done.