Emacs Lisp syntax highlighting

5
votes

I want to write a syntax highlighting extension for Emacs, but I Googling of variations on "emacs syntax highlight tutorial" have all failed. How do I go about learning how to write an Emacs highlighter? What good resources are there for learning how to do such things?

5
emacssyntax-highlightingelispsyntax-rules

5 Answers

13
votes

You're looking in the wrong place. Look at "font-lock-mode".

5
votes

There's a related question, on how to define a major mode with syntax highlighting using 'define-generic-mode. The question focuses on figuring out how to get the syntax highlighting working.

2
votes

unfortunately you were searching for the wrong terms, "syntax highlighting" is not emacs vocabulary :). You should have searched for something like "write emacs mode".

There was already a question for this: "How to write an emacs mode for a new language" with some good pointers.

1
votes

If you are interested in writing your own highlighting, another question covered this and may be of value to you. It included this code snippet:

(defun django-highlight-comments ()
  (interactive "p")
  (highlight-regexp "{%.*?%}" 'hi-orange))
(add-hook 'html-mode-hook 'django-highlight-comments)

Code courtesy of Ashutosh Mehra's answer.