Partly deferred font-locking?

[Michael Heerdegen]

Hello,

Is it somehow possible to defer (only) the more expensive parts of
font-lock using a timer?  A use case would be the symlink-target
checking fontification rules in dired: the need to check the target file
properties makes scrolling large dired buffers sluggish.

It seems there are only global settings available that also always
influence font-locking completely as a whole (`jit-lock-stealth-time',
`jit-lock-defer-time').

Are there other ways?  Or would it be worth to implement?


TIA,

Michael.