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I'd like to get a tooltip that says "meow", whenever my mouse is on the word "Cat" in Emacs. I tried this snippet I put together, but didn't work. What's wrong with it?

(defun my-hi-lock ()
(interactive)
(highlight-regexp "Cat"  '(help-echo "meow!"))
)

I'd like to put the associated tooltip message inside the highlight-regexp statement rather than define a font face at a different place because I won't reuse each tooltip message that I'm going to assign to different keywords.

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  • You don't need highlight-regexp for this (and you don't need font-lock either). Just put text-property help-echo on the buffer text for which you want the mouseover tooltip. Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 13:49
  • @Drew, is that permanent? How do you do that? Does it write something in your init file? Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 20:07
  • The property is not persisted in the file, no. You just define a function that you invoke in whatever buffer (e.g. on a mode hook, for buffers of a given mode), and which searches for a pattern and applies the property. Or have the searching be done automatically by font-lock-mode, as @Lindydancer suggests. My point was only that it is text-property help-echo (not font-lock, for example) that is responsible for the tooltip. See functions put-text-property, add-text-properties, and set-text-properties. Commented Sep 15, 2016 at 20:23

1 Answer 1

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highlight-regexp seems to assume that the value is a symbol which is defined as a face, it doesn't work with lists. However, the function is just a wrapper around font-lock-add-keywords, fortunately, you can call this function directly, for example:

(font-lock-add-keywords
 nil
 '(("Cat" (0 '(face font-lock-warning-face help-echo "meow!")))))

This will set the face property to font-lock-warning-face (feel free to pick a better one, or use nil) and the help-echo property to "meow!". Note that the symbol face must be the first entry in the list.

Note: If you do this, you must also put help-echo into font-lock-extra-managed-props, see the documentation of the variable font-lock-keywords for details.

For a concrete example, see emacs-lisp-mode.

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