Highlight Symbols, Selections, Enclosing Parens and More

Highlight things at point, selections, enclosing parentheses with different colors. Fix grumbling issue of highlights being overridden by hl-line-mode and global-hl-line-mode.

Demo

Basic Usage - First Step, Enable hl-highlight-mode

There're GLOBAL and LOCAL kinds of highlights. The global highlights appear in every buffer; The local highlights only exist in the current buffer.

Global Highlights:

• Command hl-highlight-thingatpt-global to toggle global highlight at point or selection.
• Command hl-unhighlight-all-global to remove all global highlights.

Local Highlights:

• Command hl-highlight-thingatpt-local to toggle local highlight at point or selection.
• Command hl-unhighlight-all-local to remove all local highlights.

You can change foreground and background colors of highlights:

• Foreground colors are stored in hl-highlight-foreground-colors variable.
• Background colors are stored in hl-highlight-background-colors variable.

Turn Highlight On/Off

M-x hl-global-highlight-on/off to turn highlight on or off!

Example:

Search Highlights

Put your cursor on the highlight and use following commands to search highlights.

M-x hl-find-next-thing and hl-find-prev-thing to go through highlights.

Save & Restore Highlights

Once hl-highlight-mode is on, it will save highlights automatically before Emacs exits. It will also try to restore highlights when Emacs opens.

• M-x hl-save-highlights to save highlights; M-x hl-restore-highlights to restore highlights.
• Saved file-path is stored in hl-highlight-save-file variable.

Parenthese Highlight, hl-paren-mode

• Colors of outward parentheses are stored in hl-outward-paren-fg-colors and hl-outward-paren-bg-colors variables.
• Colors of inward parentheses are stored in hl-inward-paren-fg-color variables.

Advanced - hl-highlight-special-faces

This is a special faces storage. The faces storing here are always on the top of the current line highlight (hl-line-mode and global-hl-line-mode).

Example:

;; 'YOUR-FACE will never be hidden by current line highlight.
(add-to-list 'hl-highlight-special-faces 'YOUR-FACE t)

TODO

• Highlight Enclosing syntax in Emacs REGEX.
• Integrate with helm to give ability to navigate highlights.
• Define all the parenthesis pairs using a variable that can be highlighted. issue#8

Contribution

Forks and pull requests are welcome!