23.5.3 Other Font Lock Variables

This section describes additional variables that a major mode can set by means of font-lock-defaults.

Variable: font-lock-keywords-only

Non-nil means Font Lock should not fontify comments or strings syntactically; it should only fontify based on font-lock-keywords.

Variable: font-lock-keywords-case-fold-search

Non-nil means that regular expression matching for the sake of font-lock-keywords should be case-insensitive.

Variable: font-lock-syntax-table

This variable specifies the syntax table to use for fontification of comments and strings.

Variable: font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function

If this variable is non-nil, it should be a function to move point back to a position that is syntactically at "top level" and outside of strings or comments. Font Lock uses this when necessary to get the right results for syntactic fontification.

This function is called with no arguments. It should leave point at the beginning of any enclosing syntactic block. Typical values are beginning-of-line (i.e., the start of the line is known to be outside a syntactic block), or beginning-of-defun for programming modes or backward-paragraph for textual modes (i.e., the mode-dependent function is known to move outside a syntactic block).

If the value is nil, the beginning of the buffer is used as a position outside of a syntactic block. This cannot be wrong, but it can be slow.

Variable: font-lock-mark-block-function

If this variable is non-nil, it should be a function that is called with no arguments, to choose an enclosing range of text for refontification for the command M-g M-g (font-lock-fontify-block).

The function should report its choice by placing the region around it. A good choice is a range of text large enough to give proper results, but not too large so that refontification becomes slow. Typical values are mark-defun for programming modes or mark-paragraph for textual modes.