Tue, 01 Jan 2008

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Emacs essentials 1

My favorite monospaced font: Lucida Sans Typewriter, designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Scientific American later adopted the Lucida family for its print magazine. Here's how to use it in emacs:

(set-default-font "-B&H-LucidaTypewriter-Medium-R-Normal-Sans-12-120-75-75-M-70-ISO8859-1")

I've looked for a better monospace font for a decade but haven't found one. I used to keep an eye open for the inevitable font threads in the emacs newsgroups - I'd install and try every font that people recommended, but none was just right. I finally learned to ignore the font threads and rest content with my perfectly legible B&H Lucida Sans Typewriter.

UPDATE: here's a page at emacswiki written by people like me who are unreasonably disturbed by small details of some fonts.

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