Rainbow identifiers mode

Rainbow identifiers mode is an Emacs minor mode providing highlighting of identifiers based on their names. Each identifier gets a color based on a hash of its name.

Installation

The package is available in MELPA.

If you have MELPA in package-archives, use

M-x package-install RET rainbow-identifiers RET

If you don't, open rainbow-identifiers.el in Emacs and call package-install-from-buffer.

Usage

To toggle the mode

M-x rainbow-identifiers-mode

To turn it on automatically in most programming modes:

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'rainbow-identifiers-mode)

Customization

To change the colors, change faces rainbow-identifiers-identifier-<number>.

To change the number of colors used, change the variable rainbow-identifiers-face-count.

Since version 0.1.3 it's possible to change how colors/faces are chosen. By default the old behavior is used, but it can be changed by setting the variable rainbow-identifiers-choose-face-function to a function that takes a hash and returns a face specifier. Currently there are two such functions predefined:

• rainbow-identifiers-predefined-choose-face, the default, old behavior.
• rainbow-identifiers-cie-l*a*b*-choose-face, will generate colors in the CIE L*a*b* color space without depending on any face. The color generation can be influenced by changing the following variables:
  • rainbow-identifiers-cie-l*a*b*-lightness
  • rainbow-identifiers-cie-l*a*b*-saturation
  • rainbow-identifiers-cie-l*a*b*-color-count

Since version 0.2 it's possible to allow rainbow-identifiers to override some of the highlighting done by the major mode or other minor modes by setting rainbow-identifiers-faces-to-override to a list of faces rainbow-identifiers can override.

Also since version 0.2 it's possible to filter which identifiers are highlighted by adding functions to the rainbow-identifiers-filter-functions hook. Only the identifiers for which all functions in the hook return non-nil are highlighted.