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Emacs and Slime highlight changes and how to control it
2008-05-14 18:23:26 PST
Tags: Emacs, Guide, Lisp
Massive thanks to durka on #lisp on irc.freenode.net.
New versions of slime for emacs have had enabled by default a new feature, essentially a light highlighting of uncompiled changes to a file. At first I found it annoying but then I got used to it. It is kind of handy. However I wouldn't find out how to turn it on or off. Oh well.
Then I went to use emacs on the console and the subtle light grey background highlight was suddenly grey text on a white background and completely unreadable. Very annoying, suddenly this little feature rendered -nox emacs useless.
Hours of google searching turned up nothing so finally I resorted to the irc channel. In only 10 minutes we got the answer.
<durka> aha customize emacs - applications - slime - slime mode - slime mode faces change highlight edits face
Thank you.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
What does “highlighting of compiled changes to a file” mean? Sounds interesting.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:10 am
ha, a typo… I think I blindly let Firefox’s spell checker changed unrecognized ‘uncompiled’ to a recognized ‘compiled’
It is highlighting of uncompiled changes to a file. My bad, and fixed. Thanks for noticing.
Basically it’s cool because you can end up with lots of uncompiled code in a file as Slime/Emacs lets you compile single functions in a file so it’s just a nice visual reminder of what’s been compiled and what hasn’t when you go to test stuff.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Oh, I see. That sounds very useful. I need to grab a new slime off of CVS.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am
It took a bit of time to get used to at first. But now I kind of like it. Except the console colors need tweaking because right now they are useless.
October 24th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Thank you! I use a white on black coloring scheme for my emacs and the grey used by slime here was too light, making it very difficult to read my white text. This is rather useful!!!