Colorize snippets of text in emacs

Question

Suppose I have a few words I would like to highlight, so I want to change the color of those few words only to, say, green.

Is there an easy way to do this in emacs?

Thank you.

Answer 1

This is what I've done, using font-lock-add-keywords. I wanted to highlight the words TODO:, HACK:, and FIXME: in my code.

(defface todo-face
'((t ()))
"Face for highlighting comments like TODO: and HACK:")

(set-face-background 'todo-face cyan-name)

;; Add keywords we want highlighted
(defun add-todo-to-current-mode ()
    (font-lock-add-keywords nil
       '(("\\(TODO\\|HACK\\|FIXME\\):" 1 'todo-face prepend))
       t))

Answer 2

Use library HighLight. You can use overlays or text properties. You can save the highlighting permanently or let it be temporary. You can highlight in many ways (regexp, mouse-drag,...). Lots of possibilities.

Answer 3

The highlight package has hlt-highlight-regexp-region and hlt-highlight-regexp-to-end, which do exactly what you want.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/highlight.el