Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'emacs' articles

Emacs hate mail

Edd Dumbill — 2006-05-21T19:15:32Z

Regular readers will know I'm keen on getting good-looking fonts in Emacs under Linux. And so are a lot of other people, judging by how popular my Emacs/Xft posts have been.

I have found out this is enough to drive some people to me sending nastygrams.

To: Edd Dumbill
Subject: whoareyou

I don't know who you are, but...

Emacs is a programmers editor. Sure, scalable fonts would be good for GNUEmacs, but they are not a necessity.

If you want the wysiwyg experience, try XEmacs, I don't like XEmacs, but you are welcome to try it.

I have used GNU/Emacs for the last 12 years as a code editor. I like it just fine, and that is an understatement. Leave it alone.

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Emacs font joy

Edd Dumbill — 2005-12-02T19:41:36Z

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe:

Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree

Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules :

  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts.

There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this:

  Emacs*font: Monospace-8

You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment.

OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.

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Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Edd Dumbill — 2005-12-01T18:06:10Z

Firefox extensions

The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart: Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose: Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us: Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs

Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment.

Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs.

I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion.

The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion.

I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one.

Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it...

If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

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