49.1 Faces

A face is a named collection of graphical properties: font, foreground color, background color, background pixmap, optional underlining, and (on TTY devices) whether the text is to be highlighted, dimmed, blinking, or displayed in reverse video. Faces control the display of text on the screen. Every face has a name, which is a symbol such as default or modeline.

Each built-in property of a face is controlled using a specifier, which allows it to have separate values in particular buffers, frames, windows, and devices and to further vary according to device type (X or TTY) and device class (color, mono, or grayscale). See Specifiers, for more information.

The face named default is used for ordinary text. The face named modeline is used for displaying the modeline. The face named highlight is used for highlighted extents (see Extents). The faces named left-margin and right-margin are used for the left and right margin areas, respectively (see Annotations). The face named zmacs-region is used for the highlighted region between point and mark.