Consider outline-heading-end-regexp in outline-font-lock-keywords. Example of use case: 1) emacs -Q 2) in *scratch* buffer, type ";;; Hello" in a new line, plus some line breaks 3) eval: (setq-local outline-regexp ";;;*") (setq-local outline-heading-end-regexp "\n") (setq-local outline-minor-mode-highlight 'override) (custom-set-faces '(outline-1 ((t :background "red" :extend t)))) (outline-minor-mode 1) 4) expected: since the outline-1 face has the extend attribute and the heading regexp ends in a line break, the outline-1 face on ";;; Hello" should be applied until the line break (extended) Patch: