TedCarnahan

Emacs goodness

A Tech article with View Comments posted 13 August 2009.
Tags: emacs, fonts

A couple of nifty things I learned about the new Emacs 23 in the last few days:

Because the new Emacs has XFT rendering for fonts, it really does look beautiful. One thing I didn’t like was changing my font size by starting Emacs, hating the current font size, closing Emacs, changing ~/.Xdefaults, starting Emacs again, lather, rinse, repeat. Turns out I was doing it the hard way. According to hexmode, the Right Way is:

C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font up

C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font down

This is, of course, completely awesome. Speaking of font rendering, most of the hacks for pre-loading Emacs with the new --daemon option circumvent loading the user’s environment, so other customizations in ~/.Xdefaults aren’t applied. Fix that by doing it the Right Way using pure Elisp.

Finally, there are a few cool customizations I didn’t know about posted on Musings of a Software Engineering Student. There are lots of other good Emacs tips on that website too.

And, if you’re wondering: Why does Ted care? He’s not programming full time anymore! Au contraire, I’m still working on a number of programming-related things, with cool results to be published soon. Stay tuned!