Re: How to make Emacs popular again: Use monospaced fonts less

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> One of the reasons Emacs looks kinda old-fashioned is that we use
> monospaced fonts all over the place.  Now, when programming and stuff, a
> monospaced font is preferred, but in other contexts, it looks pretty
> old-fashioned.
>
> So here's my most controversial suggestion ever:
>
> diff --git a/lisp/faces.el b/lisp/faces.el
> index 5b7e0a5aee..e6f65a5901 100644
> --- a/lisp/faces.el
> +++ b/lisp/faces.el
> @@ -2553,6 +2553,7 @@ mode-line-faces
>  (defface mode-line
>    '((((class color) (min-colors 88))
>       :box (:line-width -1 :style released-button)
> +     :inherit variable-pitch
>       :background "grey75" :foreground "black")
>      (t
>       :inverse-video t))
>
> In addition to looking nicer, it means we can fit more data into the
> mode line.

I use variable-pitch for EWW, Info, and Org buffers, so I’m generally
happy to see more uses of variable-pitch where monospace isn’t
necessary.  That said, I think it looks a bit out of place to me,
perhaps because I use a serif font for the variable-pitch face.
Variable pitch looks fine in text buffers to me, but on a single line
surrounded by monospaced text it looks a bit odd.

The modeline would benefit from prettification, of course, such as using
icons instead of the more cryptic “U:-*” indicators etc.  But perhaps
variable pitch isn’t the best way to accomplish prettification here.

Another thing I noticed is that only the active modeline has variable
pitch; perhaps all mode line faces (including mode-line-inactive) need
adjustment?

> Other obvious candidates for variable-pitching are basically any mode
> that displays data in tabular form.  And, of course, the manuals, but
> that'll happen by itself once we move from .info to .html.

Will this move only affect Emacs?  Emacs is still the best Info reader
out there and most GNU packages have manuals in Info format.  Reading
other GNU packages’ Info documentation in Emacs would still look odd,
even if the Emacs manual(s) were to be converted to HTML.

Perhaps it would make sense to augment the Info format with extra
information, so that all Info documentation would look better in all
Info readers.

-- 
Ricardo