14.12 Font Lock mode

Font Lock mode is a minor mode, always local to a particular buffer, which assigns faces to (or fontifies) the text in the buffer. Each buffer’s major mode tells Font Lock mode which text to fontify; for instance, programming language modes fontify syntactically relevant constructs like comments, strings, and function names.

Font Lock mode is enabled by default in major modes that support it. To toggle it in the current buffer, type M-x font-lock-mode. A positive numeric argument unconditionally enables Font Lock mode, and a negative or zero argument disables it.

Type M-x global-font-lock-mode to toggle Font Lock mode in all buffers. To impose this setting for future Emacs sessions, customize the variable global-font-lock-mode (see Easy Customization Interface), or add the following line to your init file:

(global-font-lock-mode 0)

If you have disabled Global Font Lock mode, you can still enable Font Lock for specific major modes by adding the function font-lock-mode to the mode hooks (see Hooks). For example, to enable Font Lock mode for editing C files, you can do this:

(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'font-lock-mode)

Font Lock mode uses several specifically named faces to do its job, including font-lock-string-face, font-lock-comment-face, and others. The easiest way to find them all is to use M-x customize-group RET font-lock-faces RET. You can then use that customization buffer to customize the appearance of these faces. See Customizing Faces.

You can customize the variable font-lock-maximum-decoration to alter the amount of fontification applied by Font Lock mode, for major modes that support this feature. The value should be a number (with 1 representing a minimal amount of fontification; some modes support levels as high as 3); or t, meaning “as high as possible” (the default). To be effective for a given file buffer, the customization of font-lock-maximum-decoration should be done before the file is visited; if you already have the file visited in a buffer when you customize this variable, kill the buffer and visit the file again after the customization.

You can also specify different numbers for particular major modes; for example, to use level 1 for C/C++ modes, and the default level otherwise, use the value

'((c-mode . 1) (c++-mode . 1)))

Comment and string fontification (or “syntactic” fontification) relies on analysis of the syntactic structure of the buffer text. For the sake of speed, some modes, including Lisp mode, rely on a special convention: an open-parenthesis or open-brace in the leftmost column always defines the beginning of a defun, and is thus always outside any string or comment. Therefore, you should avoid placing an open-parenthesis or open-brace in the leftmost column, if it is inside a string or comment. See Left Margin Convention, for details.

Font Lock highlighting patterns already exist for most modes, but you may want to fontify additional patterns. You can use the function font-lock-add-keywords, to add your own highlighting patterns for a particular mode. For example, to highlight ‘ FIXME:’ words in C comments, use this:

(add-hook 'c-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
           (font-lock-add-keywords nil
            '(("\\<\\(FIXME\\):" 1
               font-lock-warning-face t)))))

To remove keywords from the font-lock highlighting patterns, use the function font-lock-remove-keywords. See Search-based
Fontification in The Emacs Lisp Reference Manual.

Fontifying large buffers can take a long time. To avoid large delays when a file is visited, Emacs initially fontifies only the visible portion of a buffer. As you scroll through the buffer, each portion that becomes visible is fontified as soon as it is displayed; this type of Font Lock is called Just-In-Time (or JIT) Lock. You can control how JIT Lock behaves, including telling it to perform fontification while idle, by customizing variables in the customization group ‘ jit-lock’. See Customizing Specific Items.