Tuesday, September 29, 2009

When it comes to the great vi versus Emacs debate, I am firmly on both sides of the fence, using vi (or vim) for smaller, command-line based editing tasks (particularly when working on remote servers); and Emacs for software development. Unfortunately, the default Emacs installation in Linux is, to put it mildly, butt-ugly:

(Click for full-sized version... it doesn't look quite so bad when scaled down).

Playing around with the standard font selection settings doesn't help much as the standard Emacs package does not support antialiased fonts in Linux (or more precisely X.org). However since version 23.1 XFT is supported, albeit experimentially, which provides much nicer font display:

In Ubuntu the package emacs-snapshot provides antialiased font support and seems to work without any problems.

More details on XFT-enabled Emacs are here: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/XftGnuEmacs

Posted at 1:00 AM |Comments (0)