Re: Problem with CC mode hooks and font-locking

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Francis Belliveau <f.belliveau@comcast.net>
> Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2018 16:50:23 -0500
> 
> To be clear, what I am trying to do is eliminate the colors being applied to 
> text in all my files.  My understanding from the documentation is that if I 
> add (global-font-lock-mode -1) to my .emacs file before I load any modes, the 
> effects should be globally disabled.  Therefore, "failure" in this case is 
> when various portions of my text is being shown in different colors.
> 
> I am not sure that it matters, but for clarity, my .emacs setup opens up with 
> the window split vertically so that I can see two buffers simultaneously.
> For the experiments below, I always open the application from my dock so that 
> no file is loaded.  Then I usually open my .emacs file first, in the left 
> half, then the code files in order on the right.  Where I open another file 
> first, it is done in the left side and the others on the right.

Maybe the above does matters, as I'm not on macOS, so maybe there's
something macOS specific involved here; in particular, I have no idea
what does "opening application from my dock" mean.

> 1. Placing this in my .emacs file does not seem to have any effect.  Lisp, 
> C++ and Java modes all show text in lots of colors.

Just doing this one thing, i.e. having a .emacs that says only

  (global-font-lock-mode -1)

disables colors in both Lisp (including *scratch* buffer and any Lisp
file I visit) and C/Java files I visited.

Do you have anything else in your .emacs in addition to that single
line?  If so, perhaps those other things are the culprit.  What
happens if you leave just the above single line in your .emacs, and
then restart Emacs?

> 2. Removed it from main .emacs and placed it in my 'c-initialization-hook' 
> produces the following curious effects:

This is definitely not the right thing to do, so let's disregard what
you get when you do this.  (c-initialization-hook is only relevant to
C-like languages, which is not what you want.  And if you do anything
from that hook, you should only change local values,
i.e. font-lock-mode and not global-font-lock-mode; the latter is a
global mode, so it is inappropriate to turn it on or off from a mode
hook.)

> I do not understand why there is any "file load order" dependency

Because you are changing a global setting from a hook that is called
when the first C-like file is visited.