M-x all-things-emacs

Java .properties files are normally formatted using conf-javaprop-mode. Recently, I was frustrated because a single quote in a property was highlighted such that multiple lines were colored like a string until there was another quote on another line. I decided I was going to fix it… It turns out that I didn’t have to look far. C-h f conf-javaprop-mode led me to read about conf-mode which led to finding the command conf-quote-normal. This command sets the syntax of ‘ and “ to punctuation. This is the joy of using emacs. It’s the little things. My new .emacs snippet follows:

(add-hook 'conf-javaprop-mode-hook 
          '(lambda () (conf-quote-normal nil)))

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