Awesome

highlight-refontification - Visualize font-lock refontification

Author: Anders Lindgren<br> Version: 0.0.3<br> URL: https://github.com/Lindydancer/highlight-refontification<br>

Minor mode that visualizes how font-lock refontifies a buffer. This is useful when developing or debugging font-lock keywords, especially for keywords that span multiple lines.

The background of the buffer is painted in a rainbow of colors, where each band in the rainbow represent a region of the buffer that has been refontified. When the buffer is modified, the rainbow is updated.

Screenshot

Background

When you edit a file, font-lock mode recalculates syntax highlighting as you type. Clearly, this process must be fast. If not, Emacs would appear to be slow. For this reason, as little as possible is refontified, often only the line that was edited. Once Emacs is idle, a larger section is refontified.

Unfortunately, some font-lock keywords doesn't work correctly when applied to region which is too small.

Examples

You can use this tool, for example, to:

• Investigate when font-lock makes Emacs slow. If a large region is refontified for every character typed, could cause this.
• Investigate why a font-lock rule sometimes work, sometimes doesn't. One cause of this could be that the region starts in the middle of the language construct that should be highlighted.
• Investigate "blinking" syntax highlighting, i.e. the effect where one color is first applied, and after, say, half a second, another is applied.

The refontification process

When font-lock decides to update a region, it calls the functions in font-lock-extend-region-functions. Each function can extend the region. For example, when font-lock-multiline is enabled, the function font-lock-extend-region-multiline is included. It will extend the region to include all the lines of something that previously was matched in a multiline rule.

Usage

• <kbd>M-x highlight-refontification-mode RET</kbd> -- When this mode is enabled, any change in the buffer is visualized by a change in the background color.
• <kbd>M-x highlight-refontification-list-extend-region-steps RET</kbd> -- Print the steps font-lock would take to extend a region.

Other Font Lock Tools

This package is part of a suite of font-lock tools. The other tools in the suite are:

Font Lock Studio

Interactive debugger for font-lock keywords (Emacs syntax highlighting rules).

Font Lock Studio lets you single-step Font Lock keywords -- matchers, highlights, and anchored rules, so that you can see what happens when a buffer is fontified. You can set breakpoints on or inside rules and run until one has been hit. When inside a rule, matches are visualized using a palette of background colors. The explainer can describe a rule in plain-text English. Tight integration with Edebug allows you to step into Lisp expressions that are part of the Font Lock keywords.

Font Lock Profiler

A profiler for font-lock keywords. This package measures time and counts the number of times each part of a font-lock keyword is used. For matchers, it counts the total number and the number of successful matches.

The result is presented in table that can be sorted by count or time. The table can be expanded to include each part of the font-lock keyword.

In addition, this package can generate a log of all font-lock events. This can be used to verify font-lock implementations, concretely, this is used for back-to-back tests of the real font-lock engine and Font Lock Studio, an interactive debugger for font-lock keywords.

Faceup

Emacs is capable of highlighting buffers based on language-specific font-lock rules. This package makes it possible to perform regression test for packages that provide font-lock rules.

The underlying idea is to convert text with highlights ("faces") into a plain text representation using the Faceup markup language. This language is semi-human readable, for example:

«k:this» is a keyword

By comparing the current highlight with a highlight performed with stable versions of a package, it's possible to automatically find problems that otherwise would have been hard to spot.

This package is designed to be used in conjunction with Ert, the standard Emacs regression test system.

The Faceup markup language is a generic markup language, regression testing is merely one way to use it.

Font Lock Regression Suite

A collection of example source files for a large number of programming languages, with ERT tests to ensure that syntax highlighting does not accidentally change.

For each source file, font-lock reference files are provided for various Emacs versions. The reference files contains a plain-text representation of source file with syntax highlighting, using the format "faceup".

Of course, the collection source file can be used for other kinds of testing, not limited to font-lock regression testing.

Converted from highlight-refontification.el by el2markdown.