Re: Syntax Highlighting Latency in Emacs

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

jab3 wrote:
 > Peter Lee finally wrote on Wed December 22 2004 04:55 pm:
 >>maybe something like:
 >>
 >>(global-set-key (kbd "C-c m") (lambda () (interactive) (highlight-regexp
 >>"\%s" "hi-yellow")))
 >
 > Excellent.  I got that to work with font-lock-function-name-face, so
 > everything's all starting to come together.  I have a question though.  I
 > had to do something odd (at least I consider it odd :); to make '\n' work
 > in the .emacs file with the lambda function, I had to use 4 \ for it to
 > only use the '\n'.  That is,
 >
 > (highlight-regexp "\\\\n" "font-lock-function-name-face")
 >
 > is the only thing that worked correctly.  If I only did "\\n" then Emacs
 > highlighted all 'n's.  Why is it necessary to use '\\\\n' to represent
 > '\n'?  I can understand '\\n' - it's just the double that is confusing
 > me. :)

You want to match the 2-character sequence `backslash lowercase-n',
right?  In order to match the backslash character, the regular
expression is `\\'; the string that contains 2 backslashes is "\\\\".

This is discussed in the Regexps node [aka Syntax of Regular Expressions 
=============================]
of the Emacs manual; also look for the description of strings in the
Init Syntax node [aka Init File Syntax] and Glossary node.

-- 
Kevin Rodgers