Irreal

The other day I wrote about Emacs themes. It’s amazing how much difference a well chosen theme can make to your peace of mind and productivity. Just as important is the choice of a programming font. Fortunately, Emacs can support just about any font and can even look elsewhere for missing glyphs. It’s really just a matter of deciding on a font, installing it, and telling Emacs to use it.

Not all that long ago, monospaced fonts weren’t antialiased and were really ugly. Now there are several good, free fonts to choose from. Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions has a great article on 10 excellent free programmers’ fonts. Each font has a screen shot and additional information, including where to get it.

I’m a long-time user of Inconsolata, which is one of the fonts he lists, and am very happy with it. My only complaint with it is that the l (ell) and 1 (one) are a bit hard to tell apart. Some of the other fonts do better. Source Code Pro, for example has a very distinctive ell that can’t be mistaken for a one. Others have a distinctive one with an exaggerated serif at the top. Oddly, the otherwise excellent Droid Sans Mono has a zero and oh that are very difficult to tell apart unless you see them together.

If you’re looking for a new font or you just want to see some of the other choices, take a look at Gube’s article. It’s a nice set of choices and is sure to have something for just about everyone.

The other day I saw a nice bit of code from Michael Fogelman that implemented a “do what I mean narrowing” function. That seemed pretty neat and I made a mental note to add it to my init.el. Then Artur Malabarba over at Endless Parentheses, a site you should definitely add to your feed, took that code and improved it a bit.

His best idea, though, was to add it to his toggle map. Now, for almost all uses of narrowing, a single, easy-to-remember key sequence will do what he wants. That means he no longer has to remember all the different narrowing calls and their key sequences; he just has to type 【Ctrl+x t n】 and the desired narrowing takes place. I’ll definitely be adding his implementation to my version of the toggle map.

Over at lunarsite, Sebastian Wiesner has a very nice post that explains the ins and outs of autoloads in Emacs lisp. Mostly, autoloads take care of themselves but sometimes users do need to interact with them. Here’s an example that I learned from Steve Purcell.

Of course, if you’re writing packages you will need to understand how autoloads work and when to use them. Wiesner’s post gives you all the information you need. Definitely worth a read even if you’re not writing your own packages.

I started using Emacs before there was any real support for themes so I just selected the default light configuration. I made a few tweaks like making the cursor a red bar but didn’t do much fiddling otherwise. About three years ago, the white background started bothering my eyes so I changed it to oldlace and I’ve been happy enough with the result that I haven’t made any further changes.

Still, I occasionally run across a tweet or post praising some theme and I always take a look at the screen shots. So far, I haven’t seen anything that I like more than my simple non-theme but I’ll doubtless keep looking at themes people like and point out on the Web.

Now Yuriy Pitometsu over at the Google+ Emacs Community points to a very nice site that has screen shots and information on several themes. If you’re new to Emacs or unhappy with your current theme, you should take a look. Each page of the site lists several themes along with a thumbnail screen shot so you can easily find themes that interest you. Clicking on a theme brings up a larger screen shot and more information. It’s a very nice resource if you’re in the market for a new theme. Recommended.