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Is there a way, that each group in regexp can be highlighted with a different color.

For example, if I am searching for

\(text_part_1\)\|\(text_part_2\)

Can the text_part_1 be highlighted in one color and text_part_2 in another color?

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  • 1
    Are you stuck on using Helm, here? If you are open to other possibilities, Icicles search does exactly what you are asking.
    – Drew
    Dec 3, 2017 at 15:21
  • Yes, I am open to other possibilities. The documentation screenshot shows exactly what I want. I will try it and close this. Thanks a lot. Dec 3, 2017 at 16:43
  • No need to close the question. You will no doubt get good answers, including about using Helm for this. I will add an answer that mentions Icicles support for it. And I imagine there are other approaches, with or without Helm.
    – Drew
    Dec 3, 2017 at 18:11
  • I edited my answer to mention that you can get the same kind of highlighting with Isearch+.
    – Drew
    Dec 5, 2017 at 5:16

1 Answer 1

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If you use Isearch+, or if you use Icicles, then you can get this kind of regexp-group highlighting when you use Isearch or Icicles search, respectively.

For example, this screenshot shows highlighting for this input regexp:

(\([-a-z*]+\) *\((\(([-a-z]+ *\([^)]*\))\))\).*. It shows 4 levels of subgroup highlighting plus highlighting (level 0) of the full regexp match. (Up to 8 highlighting levels are possible.)

enter image description here

Whether to highlight regexp subgroups is controlled by option isearchp-highlight-regexp-group-levels-flag in Isearch and by option icicle-search-highlight-context-levels-flag in Icicles search.

In Isearch you can toggle regexp-group highlighting anytime while searching by hitting M-s h R. (In Isearch+ while searching, prefix key M-s h controls various kinds of highlighting.) Only the current search hit shows regexp-group highlighting, but the other search hits have their odd and even regexp groups highlighted differently, to easily distinguish them.


isearchp-highlight-regexp-group-levels-flag is a variable defined in isearch+.el.

Its value is t

Documentation:

Non-nil means highlight 1-8 regexp group levels, within search hit.

You can toggle this value using M-s h R during Isearch.

You can customize this variable.


icicle-search-highlight-context-levels-flag is a variable defined in icicles-opt.el.

Its value is t

Documentation:

Non-nil means highlight up to 8 context levels, within the search context.

Level highlighting is done only when this is non-nil and a subgroup is not used as the search context, that is, the context corresponds to the entire search regexp.

Remember that you can use multi-command icicle-toggle-option' anytime (**M-i M-i'** during completion) to toggle an option value.

You can customize this variable.

The faces used for regexp-group highlighting in Icicles search are icicle-search-context-level-1 through icicle-search-context-level-8. In Isearch they are faces isearchp-regexp-level-1 through isearchp-regexp-level-8.

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