emacs under X

avallach · 04-05-2007, 01:24 AM

Hello.
Every time I try to run emacs under KDE on Arch I get something like this

Code:

[sparks@krwawnik ~]$ emacs
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
Warning: Cannot convert string "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct

and the fonts look awfully corrupted :
HERE.
I tried changing the font by adding something to ~/.emacs like in some other thread here but it didn't help a lot. Strange thing is that everything works fine under console.

Sorry I tried to use emacs for first time in my life I rather prefer vim

//-----

OK I installed a thing called xemacs and it works well. But how to force to work normal emacs ?

Randux · 04-05-2007, 09:28 AM

You can set up an .Xdefaults file to use different fonts, or you can use Emacs menus to choose from a more limited set of fonts. What I do is to create one .Xdefaults and symlink it for all my users. .Xdefaults is nice because it works for all xapps not only Emacs. You can set cursor colors, etc.

You could do something like this:

Code:

emacs.font: -b&h-luxi mono-bold-o-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-microsoft-cp1252
emacs.cursorColor: Blue

Emacs is a 900 pound gorilla and it is a bit much. Vi (or one of the clones) is a lot easier to use for making quick changes to config files etc. When you're writing and testing code or running without X then Emacs is pretty nice to have. Both have steep learning curves, Emacs is definitely harder to learn than Vi. Just be glad you didn't try to learn teco!

p.s. your picture looks like a unicode problem. I saw that once but I can't remember how I fixed it. Look in your x-fonts library and try a few different ones in your .Xdefaults until you get the look you want. I don't remember how arch package management works, you may also be missing an emacs unicode or font package or maybe you have the wrong emacs version for your environment.