Get font face under cursor in Emacs
Solution 1
You can define what-face
with this code:
(defun what-face (pos)
(interactive "d")
(let ((face (or (get-char-property (pos) 'read-face-name)
(get-char-property (pos) 'face))))
(if face (message "Face: %s" face) (message "No face at %d" pos))))
After that,
M-x what-face
will print the face found at the current point.
(Thanks to thedz for pointing out that what-face
wasn’t built in.)
Solution 2
what-cursor-position
with a prefix argument shows the face under point, among other information.
Keyboard shortcut is C-u C-x =
Example output (the face property is shown in the last paragraph):
position: 5356 of 25376 (21%), column: 4
character: r (displayed as r) (codepoint 114, #o162, #x72)
preferred charset: ascii (ASCII (ISO646 IRV))
code point in charset: 0x72
syntax: w which means: word
category: .:Base, L:Left-to-right (strong), a:ASCII, l:Latin, r:Roman
buffer code: #x72
file code: #x72 (encoded by coding system undecided-unix)
display: by this font (glyph code)
nil:-apple-Monaco-medium-normal-normal-*-12-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x55)
Character code properties: customize what to show
name: LATIN SMALL LETTER R
general-category: Ll (Letter, Lowercase)
decomposition: (114) ('r')
There are text properties here:
face org-level-2
fontified t
[back]
Solution 3
M-x describe-face
Solution 4
Trey's what face is on the right track. It led me to an email on a mailing list that had this:
(defun what-face (pos)
(interactive "d")
(let ((face (or (get-char-property (point) 'read-face-name)
(get-char-property (point) 'face))))
(if face (message "Face: %s" face) (message "No face at %d" pos))))
Solution 5
There's a bug in the `what-face' code: the function takes "pos" as an argument but then doesn't use it when getting the face -- instead it uses "(point)", even though the message later claims pos in the "No face at %d" case.
Related videos on Youtube
thedz
I'm @dz on Twitter: http://twitter.com/thedz Software Engineer at Vox Media HTML/CSS JS Ruby Python StarCraft Beer
Updated on February 20, 2021Comments
-
thedz about 3 years
I've been developing my own custom color theme, and it'd be really useful if I could get a list of font-faces affecting the text under the cursor.
Something like Textmate's show current scope command.
That would save me the trouble of doing M-x customize-face and looking through available options, guessing at which one affects the current word I'm on.
Any ideas?
-
Braham Snyder over 6 yearsIn case you're looking for the same functionality using the mouse cursor (if, e.g., you cannot get
point
on the text in question), see: emacs.stackexchange.com/a/35449/13444
-
-
Trey Jackson over 14 yearsDuh, forgot it wasn't bundled with Emacs. May I put the source in my answer w/attribution? :)
-
viam0Zah over 14 yearsWhich invokes
what-cursor-position
. -
davidA almost 14 yearshmmm, sometimes it invokes what-cursor-position, sometimes it displays a list of buffer properties (including font). If I get the former behaviour, moving the cursor and repeating brings on the latter.
-
Miserable Variable almost 11 yearsI am so happy I found this, with some unknown combinations of the commands and keystrokes I got
emacs
to display how I liked it and didn't how to get it back in my next restart -
dolzenko over 10 yearsThis also includes the nice link making it possible to customize the face under cursor immediately
-
Adam Spiers over 10 yearsThis would be better placed as a comment on that answer.
-
rath about 10 yearsEven better if it had a fix... +1 for spotting it anyway
-
Wilfred Hughes over 9 yearsThis ignores faces set as text properties. If enable
hl-line-mode
you will only seehl-line
as the face, not the other faces. Consider gist.github.com/Wilfred/f7d61b7cdf9fdbb1d11c -
Samuel Edwin Ward about 8 yearsThis works well most of the time, but sometimes for reasons I can't figure out sometimes it doesn't suggest the face I'm looking for. For example in eshell when there is ansi color it just says "default".
-
Rory O'Kane about 7 yearsKarl Fogel pointed out a bug in this code in a separate answer: the output message says it’s describing the face at the
pos
parameter, but the reading of the face is actually done at(point)
rather than atpos
. -
Zelphir Kaltstahl over 6 yearsThis shows me a prompt where I can enter something. What would I need to enter, in order to describe the font under cursor?
-
Mallory-Erik about 6 yearsThis worked for me to customize code block fonts in org-mode. @Zelphir, the text before the prompt showed the face, in my case at least. You might just hit
return
. For example my result readDescribe face (default ‘org-block-background’):
. -
Fernando Basso about 6 yearsIt shows the font name on Emacs GUI. On terminal, Emacs is not responsible for setting the font and therefore such information is not available when one does
C-u C-x =
in Emacs running on the terminal, likeemacs -nw file.txt
. -
luochen1990 over 5 yearsThis doesn't works, you can use "M-x describe-face" instead.
-
cebola about 4 years
pos
is not a function; in order make the snippet work, you should replace(pos)
withpos
on lines 3 and 4