Re: font-lock and fontifying the few first nonempty lines in a buffer

[Stefan Monnier]

>     "\\`\\(\\(.+\n\\)\\{1,7\\}\\)\n"

You can also try "\\`\\(\\(.+\n\\)*?\\)\n".

> And it does indeed color the header correctly some times, but not always.
> The documentation for font-lock also says that "keywords", i.e. regexps
> in the `font-lock-keywords' variable, should not span several lines, as
> this is "unreliable", to use the Elisp manual's word.

In Emacs-21, there's a hack to try and get it to work.  It's not
100% but you might want to try it (setq font-lock-multiline t).

> This lead us back to square one, I'm afraid.

Another approach is to use font-lock-syntactic-keywords:

  (defvar foo-font-lock-syntactic-keywords
    '(("\\`." (0 "<"))
      ("\n\\(\n\\)" (1 ">"))))

This will mark the header as being a comment.  If you don't like
to color/appearance of font-lock-comment-face, you can set
`font-lock-syntactic-face-function' to something else that will
return a different face.


        Stefan