Semantic highlighting for Emacs Lisp

Installation

Install from Git with your package manager of choice.

Usage

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'semel-mode)
(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'cursor-sensor-mode)  ; Optional.

semel-mode analyzes Emacs Lisp code, highlighting each symbol it encounters according to its meaning (semantic highlighting).

By default, it also adds some help text to symbols via the help-echo text property, so you can hover over a symbol with the mouse to learn exactly what that symbol does/means. The user option semel-add-help-echo lets you control this behavior.

If you additionally enable cursor-sensor-mode, then semel-mode also highlights all occurrences of the local variable at point with a bold face.

Screenshot

Tips

• Semantic highlighting works best when you keep your code syntactically correct while editing, by using electric-pair-mode or paredit etc.
• In trusted buffers (see trusted-content), semel expands macros during code analysis. You can customize the user option scope-safe-macros to specify macros that you want semel to expand in any buffer.