RE: Grid lines in background

[Drew Adams]

> have some kind of grid lines in the background of all windows,
> for example for the shading of the background to alternate
> every 10 columns, so that I can tell reasonably easily at a 
> glance that a particular character is in column x.
> 
> I can't work out a way of doing this.  "column-number-mode" does not 
> provide what I need.  I have looked at vline.el, but this 
> seems only to highlight the column that the cursor is in.
> 
> I would really appreciate any advice about how I might approach this 
> problem.

Dunno whether this helps, but you might want to take a look at Alp Aker's code
for column highlighting:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FillColumnIndicator

I don't know whether you can use it to do what you want, but perhaps take a
look.

There are other column-highlighting libraries on the wiki as well, but perhaps
you have already tried them.  Here is are two entry points, which mention some
of them:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HighlightCurrentColumn
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EightyColumnRule