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How do I stop emacs from colouring the text of the file I am editing? I want everything just in plain white. I know that I can load themes, but it's not obvious which theme does what. Can I just disable all the colouring so that when I start emacs up, all the text is always white?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Tola Odejayi
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  • I have now done this. – Tola Odejayi Jan 07 '14 at 18:01
  • The syntax highlighting depends on the major mode. `text-mode` should not involve any syntax highlighting. – jordanm Jan 07 '14 at 18:12
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    Thanks - important for colorblind folks like me for whom the new colors and my background color look nearly identical.... – nealmcb Nov 08 '20 at 18:53
  • I was looking for "how can I stop Emacs when it's stuck in color highlighting" which is here: https://superuser.com/questions/641124/how-to-interrupt-emacs-when-control-g-does-not-work-in-very-large-files – tripleee Aug 22 '23 at 09:26

1 Answers1

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Colours are provided by the font-lock minor mode.

To disable colouring in your current buffer, toggle font-lock-mode off with this command:

M-x font-lock-mode

To disable font-lock-mode permanently, add to your init file (~/.emacs):

(global-font-lock-mode 0)

More info is available under Font-Lock in the Gnu Emacs Manual

R Perrin
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