Highlight a specific phrase in any emacs buffer, regardless of mode

Question

I would like to be able to highlight a particular phrase (in my case: @dakrone) in every emacs buffer, regardless of the mode (it's fine if it doesn't work in fundamental-mode). I know of something like:

(defun eos/add-watchwords ()
  "Highlight FIXME and TODO in code"
  (font-lock-add-keywords
   nil '(("\\<\\(TODO\\(?:(.*)\\)?:?\\)\\>"  1 'warning prepend)
         ("\\<\\(FIXME\\(?:(.*)\\)?:?\\)\\>" 1 'error prepend))))

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'eos/add-watchwords)

But I haven't gotten something like that to be applied globally instead of having to manually add every mode I want to highlight in. Is there a way do do this?

Answer 1

You can use library highlight.el to highlight any text in any buffer, using either text properties or overlays. The highlighting can be independent of font-locking or be controlled by font-lock-mode.

There are many ways to highlight, and your question is not very specific. See Highlight Library for more information.

Answer 2

You can use after-change-major-mode-hook to generalize modes, eg:

(defun eos/add-watchwords ()
  "Highlight FIXME and TODO in code"
  (font-lock-add-keywords
   nil '(("\\<\\(TODO\\(?:(.*)\\)?:?\\)\\>"  1 'warning prepend)
         ("\\<\\(FIXME\\(?:(.*)\\)?:?\\)\\>" 1 'error prepend))))

(add-hook 'after-change-major-mode-hook
  (lambda ()
    (when (derived-mode-p 'prog-mode)
      (eos/add-watchwords))))