Subject: bug#2134: [PATCH] progmodes/compile.el: check global-font-lock-mode

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2009 17:54:47 -0500

>>> Here is patch to not to turn on font-lock unconditionally. Patch is
>>> against Emacs version control tree check out 2009-01-31.
>> 
>> If you read the rest of the compile.el code, you'll see that it uses
>> font-lock to do its job, which is why it's turned on unconditionally.

> The buffer handling could be improved to work without font lock. In some

Yes, we indeed want that.  Patches welcome.

The way it could work (most likely) is by not hooking directly into
font-lock but using after-change-functions instead (and then probably
call font-lock-fontify-region (or somesuch function) from it), and only
set the `font-lock-face' property rather than `face'.

Another way to do that, would be to change font-lock-mode to allow
"invisible" activation such that `font-lock-face' is not remapped to
`face' and such that font-lock keywords end up adding entries to
`font-lock-face' rather than to `face', so that the user can later on
turn on font-lock-mode (in normal mode) at which point all the faces
would be activated.  That would be better.

        Stefan