Disable hl-line-mode at startup

Question

Something turned hl-line-mode on, which is painful to look at with my color theme.

I've added this to my .emacs

(hl-line-mode -1)
(global-hl-line-mode -1)

to no avail.

I've tried commenting out everything in my .emacs, but the highlighting still happens.

I can disable it with

M-x hl-line-mode

but I need to do that every time I visit a file.

How can I find out what's enabling it, and how can i disable it for good?

Answer 1

I actually was never able to find the culprit, but I got rid of it (at least mostly) nonetheless.

I realized it was not happening on all modes, so I ended up adding a hook for the ones it does show up in that I use the most. Perhaps it's a bit dirty, but it did the trick.

In case anyone's interested, this is what I put in my init file (notice the nil instead of a -1):

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook
  (lambda ()
    (setq hl-line-mode nil)))

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook
  (lambda ()
    (setq hl-line-mode nil)))

Answer 2

Rather than disable it, you could update its color using set-face-attribute.

The command describe-face shows the color of the thing at point and its inheritance structure. I found it helpful to give this command a permanent keybinding:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-h j") 'describe-face)

The list-colors command shows built in color names relative to your current theme. You can use these together with set-face-attribute to find a color that works for you.

I use the global-hl-line-mode with the tango-dark theme whose default highlight is bright yellow.

(load-theme 'tango-dark)    
(global-hl-line-mode 1)

 ;; Define tolerable highlighting color
 (set-face-attribute 'highlight nil :background "#3e4446" :foreground 'unspecified)

This is what the above lines look like: