Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Emacs-23 can use great (Xft) fonts too

Check out the following link for details:
http://peadrop.com/blog/2007/01/06/pretty-emacs/

Basically you need to do the following if you are using ubuntu feisty like me (there is a repo for gutsy too):

Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:
---------------------------------------------------------------
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/avassalotti/ubuntu feisty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/avassalotti/ubuntu feisty main
---------------------------------------------------------------

Then do a "
sudo apt-get update" followed by
"
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot emacs-snapshot-el"

This will install the required emacs package.

Then add the required font line to your ~/.Xresources file. In my case, I wanted to use "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono" at 10 points size. So I appended the following line to my
~/.Xresources file:
--------------------------------------------
Emacs.font: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-10
--------------------------------------------

Then in order for this to take effect, I did an
"
xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources".

After that I fired up emacs, and lo and behold... the world's
greatest 'editor' now with Xft font support :-)

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Reason for creating this blog

Whenever I have some free time, I play with my Linux box at home. During these fun times, I do some stuff, install cool software, and in the process, often figure out how to do certain things in Linux. But till now, I never noted down the successfull attempts. So I tend to forget how I did certain things in the past. This blog is an attempt to rectify that situation.

From now on, I will note down those fun moments here (... maybe even the unsuccessfull ones so that someone reading this might be able to help me out)