Make code in LaTeX look *nice*

Question

I'm currently writing a project report, and to explain the slightly crazy un-intuitive code that I've used I need to put lots and lots of short excerpts of example code in.

How I can get code into LaTeX that:

• looks nice
• doesn't go off the side of the page if the line's too long (list lstlisting or verbatim)
• is preferably inline with the rest of the text

EDITED (Figured I'd add the settings so people don't have to try and figure them out themselves (taken from wikibooks (link further down) and edited for niceness))

Nice settings:

\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{listings}
\lstset{ %
language=C++,                % choose the language of the code
basicstyle=\footnotesize,       % the size of the fonts that are used for the code
numbers=left,                   % where to put the line-numbers
numberstyle=\footnotesize,      % the size of the fonts that are used for the line-numbers
stepnumber=1,                   % the step between two line-numbers. If it is 1 each line will be numbered
numbersep=5pt,                  % how far the line-numbers are from the code
backgroundcolor=\color{white},  % choose the background color. You must add \usepackage{color}
showspaces=false,               % show spaces adding particular underscores
showstringspaces=false,         % underline spaces within strings
showtabs=false,                 % show tabs within strings adding particular underscores
frame=single,           % adds a frame around the code
tabsize=2,          % sets default tabsize to 2 spaces
captionpos=b,           % sets the caption-position to bottom
breaklines=true,        % sets automatic line breaking
breakatwhitespace=false,    % sets if automatic breaks should only happen at whitespace
escapeinside={\%*}{*)}          % if you want to add a comment within your code
}

\begin{lstlisting}
!!code!!
\end{lstlisting}

An example of these settings:

Solution 1

The listings package is quite nice and very flexible (e.g. different sizes for comments and code).

Solution 2

It turns out that lstlisting is able to format code nicely, but requires a lot of tweaking.

Wikibooks has a good example for the parameters you can tweak.

Solution 3

For simple document, I sometimes use verbatim, but listing is nice for big chunk of code.