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

Commands in library highlight.el let you (un)highlight text matching a regexp (in this case a symbol), using overlays or text properties. You can cycle among the occurrences. Highlighting can be temporary or persistent. (more info).

Answer 2

Try iedit. It highlights the word at point and lets you edit all occurrences of it easily. With an additional keystroke (C-'), it hides all the lines without that word in it. Very handy!

Answer 3

What I use is idle-highlight

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/IdleHighlight

M-x idle-highlight sets an idle timer that highlights all occurences in the buffer of the word under the point.

To enable it for all programming modes, in ~/.emacs.d/init.el:

;; highlight words
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook (lambda () (idle-highlight-mode t)))

Answer 4

Light-symbol will highlight whatever symbol point is over.

Alternately, you can use occur, which lists all lines matching a regexp. It's useful to quickly see all functions in a class.

Answer 5

Type C-s, then type the current word or type C-w. As a bonus, you can now hit C-s again to search for the word.

This is called incremental search.

Answer 6

Maybe highlight-symbol.el at http://nschum.de/src/emacs/highlight-symbol/ is what you are looking for: