Jason LeMonier wrote:

But, no file extensions, so we have to tell Emacs that a file w/ no extension is html M-x html-mode

If you will always want files with no extension to invoke html mode, try putting the following in your .emacs file: (setq initial-major-mode 'html-mode default-major-mode 'html-mode) Untested but, if you want a slightly less blunt instrument, you might be able to get html-mode for anything ending in "_html" ; make emacs give me html mode for _html files (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\_html\\'" . html-mode)) And as Robb pointed out, toggling global-font-lock-mode should give you syntax coloring. I have mine turned off by default but I think the following should do the opposite and turn it on by derault: (setq font-lock-auto-fontify t) -- And while we are sharing emacs tips, does anyone have a magic incantation that will make python mode treat the underscore as a word boundry for killing words? Using the following comment in the python-mode.el that came with xemacs 21.4.9, I hooked up the "move" commands but I am far more concerned with having this work with deletes. Underscore is a word boundery in text mode, but not in python mode. ;; For historical reasons, underscore is word class instead of ;; symbol class. GNU conventions say it should be symbol class, but ;; there's a natural conflict between what major mode authors want ;; and what users expect from `forward-word' and `backward-word'. ;; Guido and I have hashed this out and have decided to keep ;; underscore in word class. If you're tempted to change it, try ;; binding M-f and M-b to py-forward-into-nomenclature and ;; py-backward-into-nomenclature instead. This doesn't help in all ;; situations where you'd want the different behavior ;; (e.g. backward-kill-word). -- Cynthia Kiser cnk@caltech.edu