Re: org-mode and mode hooks.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I suppose the answer is really "it depends".  Many people probably
> like some highlighting but not all.  It seems the sort of thing that
> might actually be best handled by the concept of font-lock levels, but
> my impression is that they are not really used these days, and that
> it's fruit-salad or nothing.

I hate font-lock levels.  They're very poorly defined and thus can't be used
globally (you have to set them separately for each major mode) and they
never give me the control I want (I generally want to turn off some parts of
some level).

One of the problems is that levels are generally chosen by the implementer
to reflect the amount of work it takes to figure out what to highlight, so
the user can reduce the level if the highlighting slows down his Emacs
session.  In my experience I want expensive highlighting but little of it
(i.e. no fruit salad), so I often would rather turn off parts of the level-1
highlighting while I'd rather keep most/all of level 3 (for example).

E.g. it's cheap to highlight every reserved keyword, so it's in level-1, but
I generally can't care less about them.  So I end up tweaking
font-lock-keyword-face instead of font-lock-maximum-decoration.


        Stefan