Re: font-lock and fontifying the few first nonempty lines in a buffer

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

Ulf Andersson wrote:

 > I'm trying to write a major mode for Emacs, that need to fontify the few
 > first nonempty lines in the buffer. The mode do some other coloring in
 > addition to this, and that works OK. So far I have experimented with
 > `after-change-functions' and function matchers in `font-lock-keywords',
 > but all I manage to do is sending my Emacs into an infinite loop deep
 > down inside. I have to kill it from outside to get out of the lockup.
 >
 > I am using emacs 21.2.1 in a Windows 2000 environment.
 >
 > Has anyone already done somthing similar?
 > Is there an `obvious canonical way' to do this?
 > Is this downright impossible to do using `font-lock'?

If you need a regexp that matches 3 non-empty lines at the beginning of
the buffer:

interactively 
	programatically
------------- 
	---------------
\`\(.+ C-q C-j \)\{3\}	"\\`\\(.+\n\\)\\{3\\}"

(If you need a regexp that matches the first 3 lines in the buffer,
replace + by *.)

If you need a regexp that matches the first 3 non-empty lines in the buffer:

interactively 
	programatically
------------- 
	---------------
M-< 
			(goto-char (point-min))
\(^$\)*\(.+ C-q C-q \)\{3\}	"\\(^$\\)*\\(.+\n\\)\\{3\\}"

-- 
<a href="mailto:&lt;kevin.rodgers&#64;ihs.com&gt;">Kevin Rodgers</a>