Alternatives to font-lock

4
votes

I'm trying to improve Emacs highlighting of Common Lisp and I'm stuck at regexp approach to highlighting used by font-lock. Regexps aren't enough as I want to be able to recognize structure of such forms as defun - highlighting of functions' argument list should be different from the bodys' highlighting, not just global search-and-highlight.

So, are there any alternatives to font-lock in Emacs itself or somewhere in the Internet? And if so, does they operate on symbolic expressions?

2
emacshighlight

2 Answers

8
votes

Emacs' font-lock matching is not restricted to regular-expression; you can use any function as matcher provided it satisfies certain protocol. Take a look at the variable font-lock-keywords for more details.

C-h vfont-lock-keywords

3
votes

I think, that something like could be done on base of Semantic (part of CEDET package) - you can get syntactic information from parsed buffer and apply different color for different types of objects. Although I don't know any existing implementation right now