Disable hl-line in Emacs when using Emacs Starter Kit?

Question

This problem is killing my productivity.

The Emacs Starter Kit automatically enables hl-line, which highlights the current line. It makes me unable to see the highlighting on the current line.

I've tried setting (global-hl-line-mode nil) and (hl-line-mode nil) globally and added to the mode hooks such as clojure-mode-hook, but it still shows up.

What elisp do I need to disable this feature?

Answer 1

Try to place (global-hl-line-mode nil) at the bottom of your .emacs so no other command overwrites it.

Answer 2

I don't think your problem came from ESK - it doesn't enable hl-line-mode. You'd have to have a line looking like (global-hl-line-mode t) somewhere if that were true. I'd suggest to simply search for that line in your config and and remove it if you find it. There are other highlighting modes as well. ESK automatically installs idle-highlight from ELPA - maybe this is what you mean. You can remove it by deleting it's entry from this piece of code in starter-kit-elpa.el:

(defvar starter-kit-packages (list 'idle-highlight
                                   'ruby-mode
                                   'inf-ruby
                                   'css-mode
                                   'yaml-mode
                                   'find-file-in-project
                                   'magit
                                   'gist)

You should also remove the downloaded package from ELPA's folder and restart Emacs.

Answer 3

If you use ESK then the best place to put your own customizations is not .emacs but .emacs.d/{username}.el or .emacs.d/{username}/{username}.el.

Answer 4

hl-line-mode is turned on by the following line in starter-kit-defuns.el:

(add-hook 'coding-hook 'turn-on-hl-line-mode)

You can either comment out that line, or if you'd rather not touch the starter kit files, you can put the following in your personal init file at ~/.emacs.d/{username}.el:

(remove-hook 'coding-hook 'turn-on-hl-line-mode)