Hello,
I’m having some trouble trying to set up a pleasant font after upgrading
to Emacs 28. Would someone be so kind to help?
For many years I was happily using the “Terminus” bitmap font in Emacs
and terminal windows on “regular density” displays. On “HiDPI” displays
I switched to vector fonts, but for low density displays I preferred the
crisp Terminus.
I recently upgraded Emacs from 27.1 to 28.2 as part of upgrading to the
new Debian stable and this broke my font setup. I have something like
the following in my emacs config.
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "Terminus-12"))
With Emacs 28.2 the default font is now much too small (I’m not even
sure whether it’s still Terminus). It is possible to choose Terminus
with M-x menu-set-font, but this shows the same tiny font independently
of the chosen size.
I noticed the following entry in NEWS:
** The Cairo graphics library is now used by default if present.
'--with-cairo' is now the default, if the appropriate development
files are found by 'configure'. Building with Cairo is known to cause
some problems with bitmap fonts. This may require you to adjust your
font settings, or to build with Xft support instead.
Unfortunately, this is not very specific. Do “some problems” mean that
fonts like Terminus no longer work and that I have to recompile Emacs if
I want to use them, or is there some workaround? I tried to find one,
but so far without success.
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So, OK, I thought I’d go with the time and switch to a vector font on
low-density displays as well. I like how Fira Code Light looks in
xfce4-terminal.
I managed to set it to the size I like through
(add-to-list
'default-frame-alist
'(font . "-CTDB-Fira Code-light-normal-normal-*-14-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1"))
(Interestingly, I am not able to obtain this size by simply using “Fira
Code-N”. The font is either too small or too large!)
Anyway, while with the above the vertical line spacing matches the one in
xfce4-terminal, the horizontal inter-character distance is somewhat
wider. Is there a way to render the font like in xfce4-terminal?
(I believe that this issue could be related to kerning being handled
differently by Emacs/Cairo, but I did not manage to find any information
on how to adjust it.)
For reference:
----------------------------------------------------------------
(frame-parameter nil 'font-backend)
(ftcrhb x)
system-configuration-features
"ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG JSON LCMS2
LIBOTF LIBSELINUX LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 M17N_FLT MODULES NATIVE_COMP NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER
PNG RSVG SECCOMP SOUND THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS X11 XDBE XIM XPM GTK3 ZLIB"
----------------------------------------------------------------
My ~/.Xresources contains
----------------------------------------------------------------
Xft.antialias: 0
Xft.hinting: 0
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.rgba: rgb
----------------------------------------------------------------
Cheers
Christoph