How to highlight all occurrences of a word in an Emacs buffer?

Question

Notepad++ has a convenient feature: if you select a word in your text (not necessarily a keyword), the word is highlighted throughout the text. Can this be done in Emacs as

Answer 1

This may not be as nice as what you were hoping but if you put

(global-hi-lock-mode 1)

in your .emacs file then you can type C-x w h REGEX to highlight all occurances of REGEX, and C-x w r REGEX to unhighlight them again. Again, not as elegant as you'd probably like, but it'll work.