I was trying to make a simple aesthetic change to tab-bar to highlight a tab when it is moused over. mouse-face seems to work in tab-line, header-line, and obviously in mode-line. Mouse events are processed in the tab-bar window. Am I missing something obvious? I tested in 29.4 and in master. emacs -Q -l tab-bar-mouse-face.el tab-bar-mouse-face.el: (tab-bar-mode) (defun my/tab-bar-tab-name-format-function (tab i) (propertize (tab-bar-tab-name-format-default tab i) 'mouse-face '(:inverse-video t))) (setopt tab-bar-tab-name-format-function #'my/tab-bar-tab-name-format-function) -Stephane P.S. I searched for a related bug but did not find one so this could be a duplicate bug report.