CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacs
Dervin Thunk
Dervin Thunk

Reputation: 20139

Colorize snippets of text in emacs

Suppose I have a few words I would like to highlight, so I want to change the color of those few words only to, say, green.

Is there an easy way to do this in emacs?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 703

Answers (6)

charlie
charlie

Reputation: 41

The highlight package has hlt-highlight-regexp-region and hlt-highlight-regexp-to-end, which do exactly what you want.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/highlight.el

Upvotes: 3

Drew
Drew

Reputation: 30708

Use library HighLight. You can use overlays or text properties. You can save the highlighting permanently or let it be temporary. You can highlight in many ways (regexp, mouse-drag,...). Lots of possibilities.

Upvotes: 3

ajd.
ajd.

Reputation: 659

I use what Dimitri suggested. In particular, I have the following two lines in my .emacs

(global-hi-lock-mode t)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-M-h") 'highlight-regexp)

Every-time I need to highlight a certain word (or regex) in a buffer, I hit "C-M-h", which then prompts me for the word (or regex) I want to be displayed differently and then for a face to display it in.

Upvotes: 0

Dmitry
Dmitry

Reputation: 6770

If you want them highlighted only temporarily, I find M-x highlight-regexp command very helpful, it is especially nice for looking through log files of sorts. For example you made yourself a logging class that outputs some tracing info like MyClass::function() > when function is run and MyClass::function() < when it exits (can be especially useful sometimes when debugging multithreading issues) then you just ask emacs to highlight some of them green and other red and then you can see how did the execution go.

Upvotes: 1

seh
seh

Reputation: 15259

Use the function font-lock-add-keywords to define a new matcher for the string in question, binding that matcher to some face you've defined that will display as green. For example:

(font-lock-add-keywords nil
  '("\\<foo\\>" 0 my-green-face))

Note that you can specify a particular mode where I wrote nil above, and the matching forms can take on any of six different styles. See the documentation for the variable font-lock-keywords for the rules and a few examples.

Upvotes: 1

Marc
Marc

Reputation: 776

This is what I've done, using font-lock-add-keywords. I wanted to highlight the words TODO:, HACK:, and FIXME: in my code.

(defface todo-face
'((t ()))
"Face for highlighting comments like TODO: and HACK:")

(set-face-background 'todo-face cyan-name)

;; Add keywords we want highlighted
(defun add-todo-to-current-mode ()
    (font-lock-add-keywords nil
       '(("\\(TODO\\|HACK\\|FIXME\\):" 1 'todo-face prepend))
       t))

Upvotes: 3

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