Instead of doing something useful I spent the first part of the day coaxing/cargo-culting emacs to fontify user-definied defoo forms nicely. In case someone else is was annoyed by the this lack of angry-fruit-saladness, here goes (eg. add this to lisp-mode-hook): ;; Fontification for user-defined defoo macros (font-lock-add-keywords 'lisp-mode '(("(\\(def.*?\\)\\>[ '(]*\\(setf[ ]+\\sw+)\\|\\sw+\\)?" (1 font-lock-keyword-face) (2 (let ((name (match-string 2))) (when name (cond ((string-match "^\\*" name) font-lock-variable-name-face) ((string-match "^\\+" name) font-lock-constant-name-face) (t font-lock-function-name-face))))))) t) Won't take effect without restarting emacs -- or some other trickery that I'm not aware of. Cheers, -- Nikodemus