Basic Faces

If your Emacs Lisp program needs to assign some faces to text, it is often a good idea to use certain existing faces or inherit from them, rather than defining entirely new faces. This way, if other users have customized those existing faces to give Emacs a certain look, your program will fit in without additional customization.

Some of the basic faces defined in Emacs are listed below. In addition to these, you might want to make use of the Font Lock faces for syntactic highlighting, if highlighting is not already handled by Font Lock mode, or if some Font Lock faces are not in use. See Faces for Font Lock.

default

The default face, whose attributes are all specified. All other faces implicitly inherit from it: any unspecified attribute defaults to the attribute on this face (see Face Attributes).

mode-line-active

mode-line-inactive

header-line

tab-line

Basic faces used for the mode line, header line, and tab line.

tool-bar

tab-bar

fringe

scroll-bar

window-divider

border

child-frame-border

Basic faces used for the corresponding decorations of GUI frames.

cursor

The basic face used for the text cursor.

margin

The basic face used for window margins, both on the left and on the right. It is commonly used to customize the background of the empty areas of the margins, and it also provides the base attributes for strings displayed in the margins (see Displaying in the Margins). It inherits from the default face.

mouse

The basic face used for displaying mouse-sensitive text when the mouse pointer is on that text.

bold

italic

bold-italic

underline

fixed-pitch

fixed-pitch-serif

variable-pitch

These have the attributes indicated by their names (e.g., bold has a bold :weight attribute), with all other attributes unspecified (and so given by default).

shadow

For dimmed-out text. For example, it is used for the ignored part of a filename in the minibuffer (see Minibuffers for File Names in The GNU Emacs Manual).

link

link-visited

For clickable text buttons that send the user to a different buffer or location.

highlight

For stretches of text that should temporarily stand out. For example, it is commonly assigned to the mouse-face property for cursor highlighting (see Properties with Special Meanings).

match

isearch

lazy-highlight

For text matching (respectively) permanent search matches, interactive search matches, and lazy highlighting other matches than the current interactive one.

error

warning

success

For text concerning errors, warnings, or successes. For example, these are used for messages in *Compilation* buffers.