I find the following customizations very useful for editing Julia code in Emacs. Add them to julia-mode-hook, eg (defun customize-julia-mode () "Customize julia-mode." (interactive) ;; my customizations go here ) (add-hook 'julia-mode-hook 'customize-julia-mode) Highlight FIXME/TODO/… When I just want to note something in a comment for future reference, I prefer to have certain words highlighted.