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I've found I can make some comments use a different face by customizing font-lock-syntactic-face-function.

To give some context, I'm setting some comments to use font-lock-doc-face, in situations the major mode isn't setting it.

Currently I'm swapping in a new function, while it works using setq seems clunky.

;; Just an example.
(defconst mycustom-comment-prefix "////")
(defvar mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function-original nil)
(defun mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function (state)
  (cond
    ;; Check if this comment starts with `mycustom-comment-prefix'.
    ((and (nth 4 state)
       (let ((p (nth 8 state)))
         (string-equal
           mycustom-comment-prefix
           (buffer-substring-no-properties p (+ p (length mycustom-comment-prefix)))))
       'font-lock-doc-face)
      (t
        ;; Default behavior.
        (funcall mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function-original state))))

  ;; --- snip ---

  ;; When enabling...
  (setq mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function-original
    font-lock-syntactic-face-function)

  ;; Restore when disabling...
  (setq font-lock-syntactic-face-function
    mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function-original))

Is there a better way to handle the function override?

| improve this question | |
  • 1
    I’m voting to close this question because questions about "the best way" or "is there a better way" are too broad and invite primarily opinion-based answers. As such they're off-topic here. – Drew Jun 26 at 15:20
  • Seems reasonable, I wasn't sure how to phrase this question, I'm interested to customize font locking and not sure if I'm overriding this in the right way. – ideasman42 Jun 27 at 3:42
  • You may be able to find a more specific question, perhaps by looking closer at something you are doing which doesn't do what you expect, or by asking how to do some specific thing. Underneath a vague or broad request for ideas or advice there are often some specific problems or questions. I'm guessing that's the case here. – Drew Jun 27 at 4:17
1

Some of the details of what is "this" is missing, as is the explanation of what you find clunky, but I'd recommend you use add-function and remove-function instead of setq:

(defun mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function (orig-fun state)
  ;; Check if this comment starts with `mycustom-comment-prefix'.
  (if (and (nth 4 state)
           (save-excursion
             (goto-char (nth 8 state))
             (looking-at mycustom-comment-prefix)))
      'font-lock-doc-face
    ;; Default behavior.
    (funcall orig-fun state)))

  ;; --- snip ---

  ;; When enabling...
  (add-function :around (local 'font-lock-syntactic-face-function)
                #'mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function)

  ;; Restore when disabling...
  (remove-function (local 'font-lock-syntactic-face-function)
                   #'mycustom-font-lock-syntactic-face-function)
| improve this answer | |
  • Thanks, this works perfectly, clarified this – ideasman42 Jun 29 at 0:23

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