Please post a small screenshot for the setup that you recommend. It’s pain in the rear to hunt down the font, install it and see for yourself whether you like it.
After searching high and low for a font to use in Emacs, I finally found http://www.proggyfonts.com and http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont which both contain a good number of free monospace fonts that remain perfectly readable at extremely small sizes. --TimAnderson
Not so much a recommendation but I have just installed Dina. It has the virtue of including italic and bold italic variants. I have not yet decided whether I will stick with it. --JohnYates? http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/index.html http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-533782-highlight-dina.html http://ahri.net/static/dina.pcfs.tar.bz2
The proggy fonts are nice and I used them for more than a year. But I use Emacs for a lot more than programming alone. I also write and read prose in form of e-mail and (La)TeX documents and much of it in languages other than English. I found it annoying that all of the many proggy fonts fail to provide all of the Latin-1 glyphs I need (áâãäéêíïóôõöúüçß).
Fonts with a “geometric” a like Monaco are unacceptable IMHO because the a can, at a glance, be confused with an o. The Neep font at 14 pt is not crispy enough to me. So the choice was between Andale and Terminus. I have used both before, and although they don’t look as pretty as the proggy fonts at small sizes, they have all the glyphs I need and as a bonus the Euro currency symbol. I decided in favor of the Terminus. It’s a very crispy font. I use it at either 14 pts and (setq-default line-spacing 0) or 12 pts and line-spacing 2 with a 15” laptop LCD monitor
The table bellow summarizes the amount of text you get in Emacs in single-window mode with the fonts I’ve tested:
Font/Size(PxlSz) Lines Columns ------------------------------------- Andale 80 62 143 Neep 120 57 167 Neep 140 50 125 Neep 200 37 100 Proggy Clean 80 57 143 Proggy Small 80 75 143 Proggy Square 80 68 148 Proggy Tiny 80 75 167 Terminus 120 62 167 Terminus 140 53 125
--EmilioLopes.
What fonts to use depends on your monitor size and the screen resolution, and of course on personal taste. Here are some recommendations by users for specific situations. See also SetFonts.
On dark backgrounds, I recommend checking out bitmap fonts instead of TrueType? ones.
(set-face-font 'default "fixed") and (scroll-bar-mode -1) gave me an Emacs window that is 80 characters wide and that takes up exactly half the screen, perfect for a netbook running a tiling window manager. (DanielMoerner?)-jmk-neep alt-medium-r-*-*-20-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 (AlexSchroeder, screenshot) – neep might require (setq x-use-underline-position-properties nil). Gives 37 lines and 100 columns. -*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-*-140-75-75-*-*-iso8859-15 – gives 53 lines and 125 columns, or even-*-terminus-medium-r-*-*-*-120-75-75-*-*-iso8859-15 – with (setq line-spacing 2) for 62 lines and 167 columns. --EmilioLopes-raster-Fixedsys-normal-r-normal-normal-12-90-96-96-c-*-*-* (MacChan)
-xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--20-200-72-72-c-100-iso10646-1 (JorgenSchaefer)-*-Monaco-normal-r-*-*-17-102-120-120-c-*-iso8859-1 (MacChan)
7x14 (AlexSchroeder)-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-2 (JakubNarebski)
-outline-Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-normal-r-normal-normal-12-90-96-96-c-*-iso8859-1 (WalterHiggins) 
-dec-terminal-medium-r-normal-*-*-140-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 (ErikBourget)-xos4-terminus-medium-r-normal--14-140-*-*-*-*-*-* (JeremyCowgar)(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Inconsolata" :height 140) (AmitPatel)
(set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Anonymous Pro" :height 140) (AmitPatel)
-jmk-neep alt-medium-r-*-*-20-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1 (AlexSchroeder) – neep might require (setq x-use-underline-position-properties nil) xfonts-jmk package fixes the underline position bug as of 3.0-17.neep-alt-24 – Most XFree86 distributions come with Lucida Typewriter as a fixed-width font. It’s about the best I’ve found. I know a lot of others use it as well. The size depends on your monitor. I typically use 12pt. – LathI-*-lucidatypewriter-medium-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-* – In addition, if you want the italic shape, which isn’t available in the free lucidatypewriter, try the iso8859-1 encoding of GNU Intlfonts (Where is this font? Is it the same as misc-fixed?) or the misc-fixed font (which is part of the standard XFree86 4.1 distro). If you only have occasional italics, it’s reasonable to mix the faces, e.g. with an extra X resource as follows. – fxEmacs.italic.attributeFont: -*-fixed-medium-o-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-* – The lucydatypewriter font is missing some more unicode characters than the fixed fonts. If you want to use lucidatypewriter but display unicode characters like math symbols or line drawing characters with the fixed font you can do this with FontSets.~/.Xresources Emacs*Fontset-0: -b&h-lucidatypewriter-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-m-*-fontset-normal,\
mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1,\
mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1,\
mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-13-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1
Emacs*font: fontset-normal-bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-*
I often need better Unicode coverage than provided by most monospaced fonts, like Proggy. The priorities are Cyrillic and Greek fonts. Terminus and Monaco are not bad, but they have a decorative spirit. My favorite font is GNU intlfonts, aka ETL. It has no bold or italic versions for non-Latin alphabets, but otherwise looks quite well. Here are some samples:
Hello, this is one of your enemies: a Vim-fanatic. Nontheless, I wondered if you might also seek for some feasible fonts at small sizes, and so didn’t hardly hesitate to enter the evil world of Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift, commonly known as EMACS. I personally found the DINA font very pleasing. When I saw it mentioned in the preface, I had to admit you have no bad taste - well, as far as fonts are concerned. When differentiating between an OS and an editing facility, you’re still at odds (my opinion). I found DINA very pleasing indeed but in the last years got convinced of all the benefits one begets using DejaVu Sans Mono. Any size (small for myself, huge when showing off some snippets to others), a whole bunch of codepages supported (I use the NEO ergonomic keyboard layout giving direct access to many glyphs most of which DejaVu surprisingly knows about), and readability 24/7. I do love that font. Every now and then I’d still switch back to DINA but never for too long. Glad to have found DejaVu here, too.
Greetings from Germany (apologies for any mistakes in English spelling/wording/…)
The CVS Emacs (23.0.60.6) (see XftGnuEmacs) has some problems with fonts because of the wrong “preferred charset” recognition, so I tried some TTF fonts, which I generally avoid. DejaVu Mono-12 was very good:
RedHat Liberation Mono is another acceptable option. There are two versions of this font. The first edition lacks the dotted 0, so be careful to download the right version (available here).
Update @2008-04-01: This is Liberation Mono 12. Note a somewhat better hinting:
If you need a better Unicode coverage, GNU Unifont might work. However, it only gives you regular (i.e. no bold / italics).
Evaluate the following code in your *scratch* buffer:
(dolist (font-family (font-family-list))
(let ((str font-family))
(insert (propertize (concat "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog ("
str ")") 'face `((:family ,font-family))))
(newline)))
The above code will display variable-width fonts as well as monospace fonts which isn’t much help for general Emacs usage. See this Gist for a function to display only monospaced fonts.
It would be really nice to have a “fonts for beginners” page, pointed to from this page. Such a page would have an executive summary – basically a brief and useful reference card – of the following:
- most important basic information
- for people who NEED BIG FONTS NOW
- for people who NEED SMALL FONTS NOW
- some people can't use emacs until this is
fixed!
- a pointer to the above from the main emacs wiki page
- how to set the default font
- how to choose a font
- in emacs
- in linux, windows, and mac
- considerations (basic, terse)
- 0O oa 1l|! for programming
- monospace for programming
- antialiasing, resizability, lcd/crt
- how to choose font properties (bold, etc.) and colors
- whether there are any xemacs vs. emacs issues
- how to identify a font problem and fix it
- wrong color, blinking, fuzzy, small, large
- what face is below point?
- how to set a face
- a pointer to this page for suggesting nice fontsI am not the person to write this, however. – gambarimasu
Heard on #emacs after a discussion about font issues:
<goron> should think it shouldn't be too hard to configure an editor... <kensanata> depends on your definition of "editor" i guess... <kensanata> we're known to have strange misconceptions in that regard.