How to activate the emacs highlight mode for .conf files?

Fabio Paolini · 09-27-2009, 06:13 PM

Hello, I use GNU Emacs 21.4.2 in SlackWare 12.0 and after some search I was able to activate the highligh mode for some languages: bash, latex, C and others (even the .emacs file comes with highlight mode). However some files like squid.conf, resolv.conf among others linux config files come with no color mode, although my Debian installation has color mode to these files, which shows that it is possible!

Someone knows what can be done to activate the color mode in these files?

Many thanks

brianL · 09-28-2009, 03:50 AM

Put this in your .emacs file:

Code:

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

See here for all sorts of information about emacs (customising,etc):

http://www.emacswiki.org/

Fabio Paolini · 09-28-2009, 09:02 PM

Thanks for your reply brianL, but even if I put this text in my .emacs file
the .conf files do not come with highlights. Many others kind of files come with colors, like /bin/sh, *.tex files, among others. I tried even to put just the lines you suggested (removing the others), but it does not work too.

I saw the link you have shown, but there is a lot of things there. If you could point a more specific address where it is shown how to edit the .emacs I would appreciate. I will keep reading that link any way.

brianL · 09-29-2009, 04:15 AM

Here's the page regarding .emacs files, easy enough to find.
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryDotEmacs

I've opened several .conf and .cfg files in emacs, with the above lines in my .emacs file, and get syntax highlighting on them all.

Fabio Paolini · 09-30-2009, 10:41 AM

Thanks, it is really easy to find, but I had not realized that dotemacs means .emacs.

About the highlights of .conf files, maybe there is some other problem in my emacs installation, some files missing for example.

Recently I found a way to add colors to the nano editor, where it is need to add some files in the /usr/share/nano directory. So I thought something like that may be lacking in my emacs, I don't know.

brianL · 09-30-2009, 11:34 AM

Files like that, .emacs and .nanorc, are usually put in your home directory.