Question

How to get highlighting from interactive regex search in emac to remain highlight until deactivated? For instance, with the text provided and running M-C-s (Regexp I-Search) with input ‘file’ will highlight the 3 ‘file’ words in the text below.

;; This buffer is for notes you don't want to save, and for Lisp evaluation.
;; If you want to create a file, visit that file with C-x C-f,
;; then enter the text in that file's own buffer.

Regexp I-Search %> file

But, once I start to edit the file the highlighting will disappear. I’d like to keep the highlighting for a while — until I run another command to turn it off. How could I do this?

Answer 1

You’re looking for highlight-regexp bound to M-s h r. M-s h u unhighlights.

highlight-symbol provides a nice wrapper around this.