Around a month ago, I wrote about Charles Choi’s post on Tuning Emacs to Write Prose in Org and Markdown. One of his suggestions was to use proportional fonts when you’re writing prose. He claimed it’s easier to read and less distracting while you’re writing.
I wasn’t exactly dismissive of this suggestion but it’s fair to say that I was skeptical. After all, I’ve written two books and close to 5,000 Irreal posts all in a monospaced font using one markup language or another. Nevertheless, I decided to try it out for a while starting with that original post commenting of Choi’s.
I found that I actually did like it for writing prose but I didn’t want all my Org buffers rendered with a proportional font. I already had a bit of Elisp to set up my blog post buffers so I just added some code to toggle on variable-pitch-mode. Then I thought that I should really do this with directory local variables so I put a .dir-locals.el file in my blog directory but I got maximum lisp evaluation depth exceeded errors.
This has happened to me before when I tried to use directory local variables with the eval keyword and after messing around with max-lisp-eval-depth without success, I finally gave up and returned to my Elisp hack.
In any event, I’ve now officially adopted proportional fonts as my standard for writing prose. It turns out Choi was right all along.