Re: How easy to create new major mode?

[Colin Marquardt]

"Tim Morley \(remove vegetable for email address\)" <tim@teamlog.turnip.com> 
writes:

> Hi all.
>
> I believe the solution to my current emacs challenge will be to create a new
> major mode, albeit a very simple one. I'd be grateful for
>    (a) confirmation that this is the way to attack the problem (or failing
> that, a better suggestion)
> and assuming this is indeed the case
>    (b) guidance/URLs/code samples to help me put together what I need.
>
> What I would like to achieve is a customised system of syntax colouration,
> to help with reading through hundreds of lines of text. All I need is for
> lines starting with the word User to come up in, say, magenta, and lines
> starting with System in blue, with a default text colour of grey. (There are
> carriage-returns at the end of each line of text, so my keywords will always
> be at the beginning of a new line).

Funny, I just answered a similar question over in comp.emacs in
<k8z7kclmfxv.fsf@slsf86.stgl.sel.alcatel.de>.

I'll just copy my article:

Pat Colbeck <pcolbeck@bashq.org> writes:

> Can anyone point me at some good references for writing a basic syntax
> highlighting mode. I need to write some for highlighting some debug
> outputs from routers etc. I am not a programer so the simpler the better
> :)
>
> So far I have found:
>
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CategoryCode

This also points you to
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ModeTutorial 
which should help if you want to write a full mode.

To stay really simplistic, you could try highlight-regexp like this:

(defun cm-colorize ()
  "Colorize stuff. Uses highlight-regexp aka hi-lock-face-buffer from 
hi-lock.el."
  (interactive)
  ;;(highlight-regexp REGEXP &optional FACE)
  (highlight-regexp "ERROR" 'hi-red-b)
  (highlight-regexp "FIXME" 'hi-red-b)
  (highlight-regexp "ANN:" 'hi-pink)
  (highlight-regexp "success" 'hi-green)
  (highlight-regexp "\\bcomplete\\b" 'hi-green)
  (highlight-regexp "Testing [A-Za-z0-9_]+" 'hi-blue)
)

Or use that here as a starting point:

(defun my-highlight-fixme ()
  (interactive)
  (font-lock-mode 1)
  (font-lock-add-keywords
   nil '(("\\<\\(FIXME\\|TODO\\|XXX\\|!!!\\)" 1 font-lock-warning-face 
prepend))))
(add-hook 'c-mode-common-hook 'my-highlight-fixme)
(add-hook 'cperl-mode-hook 'my-highlight-fixme)
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'my-highlight-fixme)
(add-hook 'vhdl-mode-hook 'my-highlight-fixme)

HTH,
  Colin