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From: john.nospam@nospamassen.nospamdemon.co.uk (John McCabe)
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Subject: Re: Enabling global-font-lock-mode
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On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 20:11:27 +0200, Florian Lindner
<Florian.Lindner@xgm.de> wrote:

>John McCabe wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 17:39:29 +0200, Florian Lindner
>> <Florian.Lindner@xgm.de> wrote:
>> 
>>>Hello,
>>>I want to enable Syntax Highlightning (Global font lock mode)
>>>Using this expression in my .emacs file is evaluated without errors but
>>>don't take effect. What's wrong?
>>>
>>>'(global-font-lock-mode t nil (font-lock))
>> 
>> What version of Emacs are you using? If anything after 20.0, use the
>> "Customize" features to do it rather than edit your .emacs.
>> 
>> It may be under the "Help" menu, or the "Options" menu. Find the
>> "Customize" menu, then "Specific Option" and enter
>> global-font-lock-mode when asked.
>
>I prefer to edit the .emacs directly, it's a greater learn effect and I 
>don't like to use things that I don't understand.

Unfortunately it's also a greater risk that it won't work on future
versions! Customize is there to make things easier for you, it is
simple, generally reliable, and *should* be consistent. That can't be
said for hand-editing .emacs. If you really want to hand-edit .emacs,
use Customize instead then look at the difference when you set a
value.

In your original question you said you had added:

'(global-font-lock-mode t nil (font-lock))

Now, if that was somewhere within the

(custom-set-variables
  ...
)

block, it should have worked *unless* you had something hand-edited
elsewhere that switched it back off. If you just put that line in
outside the custom-set-variables block it isn't going to work.