Question

I have a log file that has a lot of tagging information, i.e, “ERROR”, “WARNING”, “***”. I want to show the log info with different color/fonts based on the tagging info.
How can I do that?

Do I have to come up with my own major/minor modes? Is there some elisp code that I can reuse?

Answer 1

You can do this interactively with:

M-s h r regexp <RET> FACE <RET>

or

C-x w h regexp <RET> FACE <RET>

see the documentation for Interactive Highlighting. Note: The second key binding is only available after you’ve turned on Hi-Lock mode via M-x global-hi-lock-mode.

If you want to set up a minor mode to do this on a regular basis, I’d check out fixme-mode and modify things from there.

It might be useful to read the Faces portion of the manual to understand what is going on.