38.11.1 Standard Faces

This table lists all the standard faces and their uses. Most of them are used for displaying certain parts of the frames or certain kinds of text; you can control how those places look by customizing these faces.

default

This face is used for ordinary text.

mode-line

This face is used for mode lines, and for menu bars when toolkit menus are not used--but only if mode-line-inverse-video is non-nil.

modeline

This is an alias for the mode-line face, for compatibility with old Emacs versions.

header-line

This face is used for the header lines of windows that have them.

menu

This face controls the display of menus, both their colors and their font. (This works only on certain systems.)

fringe

This face controls the colors of window fringes, the thin areas on either side that are used to display continuation and truncation glyphs.

scroll-bar

This face controls the colors for display of scroll bars.

tool-bar

This face is used for display of the tool bar, if any.

region

This face is used for highlighting the region in Transient Mark mode.

secondary-selection

This face is used to show any secondary selection you have made.

highlight

This face is meant to be used for highlighting for various purposes.

trailing-whitespace

This face is used to display excess whitespace at the end of a line, if show-trailing-whitespace is non-nil.

In contrast, these faces are provided to change the appearance of text in specific ways. You can use them on specific text, when you want the effects they produce.

bold

This face uses a bold font, if possible. It uses the bold variant of the frame's font, if it has one. It's up to you to choose a default font that has a bold variant, if you want to use one.

italic

This face uses the italic variant of the frame's font, if it has one.

bold-italic

This face uses the bold italic variant of the frame's font, if it has one.

underline

This face underlines text.

fixed-pitch

This face forces use of a particular fixed-width font.

variable-pitch

This face forces use of a particular variable-width font. It's reasonable to customize this to use a different variable-width font, if you like, but you should not make it a fixed-width font.

Variable: show-trailing-whitespace

If this variable is non-nil, Emacs uses the trailing-whitespace face to display any spaces and tabs at the end of a line.