Alternatives to font-lock

Question

I'm trying to improve Emacs highlighting of Common Lisp and I'm stuck at regexp approach to highlighting used by font-lock. Regexps aren't enough as I want to be able to recognize structure of such forms as defun - highlighting of functions' argument list should be different from the bodys' highlighting, not just global search-and-highlight.

So, are there any alternatives to font-lock in Emacs itself or somewhere in the Internet? And if so, does they operate on symbolic expressions?

Answer 1

Emacs' font-lock matching is not restricted to regular-expression; you can use any function as matcher provided it satisfies certain protocol. Take a look at the variable font-lock-keywords for more details.

C-h vfont-lock-keywords