Highlighting backticks in comments
reddit / emacs

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[deleted] · 2022-09-05 06:30

A regex understander recently helped me solve the last problem I had
getting this to work, so I thought I'd share in case anyone else wants
this feature.

There's a cool package named [hl-prog-extra](https://melpa.org/#/hl-
prog-extra) which lets you write regexes for highlighting some things
extra specially. In comments, I wanted words surrounded by backticks
to be highlighted like GitHub or `lsp-ui-mode` do. My `init.el`
contains:

    (setq hl-prog-extra-list
        (list
         ;; Match `symbol`.
         '("`[^`\n]+`" 0 comment lsp-face-semhl-namespace)))

Which gives me cool highlighting like:

https://preview.redd.it/6b4y5wpjhzl91.png?width=723&format=png&auto=we
bp&s=60ca6e30cf16688802a31e62a28a5a284bab6da3

As you can see, everything within backticks is purple, but the words
between them are still grayed out. Just thought I'd mention, in case
anyone here wants this too.

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Atemu12 · 2022-09-05 10:05

Could you add this solution as an answer to
https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/73293/highlight-variables-
functions-in-commens-of-all-prog-modes?

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elimik31 · 2022-09-05 14:04

In python (and some other modes) I use [tree-sitter-hl-
mode](https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/syntax-highlighting) for
tree-sitter based syntax highlighting so I was wondering if that's
compatible with these extras. I found that the above snippet for
normal comments works. However, the package comes with some presets
for python doc-strings, to highlight sphynx-style markup, and that
didn't work, that only appeared when I disabled `tree-sitter-hl-mode`.
I'm wondering if one can make those two work together or there's
fundamental icompatibility. Anyway, I created [issue
#5](https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/emacs-hl-prog-extra/issues/5) for
that.

Note: In general, if you want to use the pre-sets, I would prefer
`add-to-list` over `setq`, e.g.:

      (customize-set-variable 'hl-prog-extra-preset t)
      (add-to-list 'hl-prog-extra-list
                   '("`[^`\n]+`" 0 comment lsp-face-semhl-namespace))
      (global-hl-prog-extra-mode)

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[deleted] · 2022-09-05 16:34

Thanks for the tip!