18. Faces

VM uses Emacs faces to emphasize text in the folder and summary buffers. Instead of defining VM specific faces, VM's face usage is controlled by customization variables that can point to faces. This allows you to use standard Emacs faces, or to create your own. So when you want to change which face is used, write code like this:

(setq vm-summary-highlight-face 'bold-italic)

In the summary buffer, VM displays the summary entry for the current message using the face specified by the vm-summary-highlight-face variable. The value of this variable should be a symbol that names a face, or nil which means don't display the summary entry of the current message in a special way.

The variable vm-mouse-track-summary controls whether summary entries are highlighted when the mouse pointer passes over them. The highlighting is done using the standard Emacs highlight face.

In the folder buffer, the header contents of headers matched by the vm-highlighted-header-regexp variable are displayed using the face named by vm-highlighted-header-face. This variable is ignored under XEmacs if vm-use-lucid-highlighting is non-nil. The XEmacs highlight-headers package is used instead. See the documentation for the function highlight-headers to find out how to customize header highlighting using this package.

URL's that occur in message bodies are displayed using the face named by vm-highlight-url-face. Searching for URLs in a large message can take a long time. Since URLs often occur near the beginning and near the end of messages, VM offers a way to search just those parts of a message for URLs. The variable vm-url-search-limit specifies how much of a message to search. If vm-url-search-limit has a positive numeric value N, VM will search the first characters and the last characters in the message for URLs.

The face named by vm-mime-button-face is used to display the textual buttons that trigger the display of MIME objects.