I use Emacs for a certain number of tasks (mostly LaTeX, Perl and Postscript).

One news had my attention some time ago. Emacs is now capable of using all the system fonts, any size. Following a request from a friend, I finally tested it... and adopted it.

The method was easy at work, in i386 architecture. Ubuntu (or one of its user: Alexandre Vassalotti) has some packages for emacs-snapshot that use the emacs-unicode-2 branche of development. Recompiling was no problem.

At home, I use the amd64 architecture, not proposed by M. Vassalotti's mirror. I had to redo the work (about fifteen minutes).

• Update my pbuilder
• cd /tmp;wget http://debs.peadrop.com/pool/feisty/backports/emacs-snapshot_20070705.orig.tar.gz
• wget http://debs.peadrop.com/pool/feisty/backports/emacs-snapshot_20070705-1.dsc
• wget http://debs.peadrop.com/pool/feisty/backports/emacs-snapshot_20070705-1.diff.gz
• sudo pbuilder build emacs-snapshot_20070705-1.dsc
• The result is by default located in /var/cache/pbuilder/result. I installed emacs-snapshot, emacs-snapshot-bin-common, emacs-snapshot-common and emacs-snapshot-gtk. Then I put in automatic mode all but the last one: aptitude markauto emacs-snapshot emacs-snapshot-bin-common emacs-snapshot-common.

The result is not on this blog (Emacs is big), but on my partial mirror (as usual) and I advise anyone to do it by oneself (as usual).

I wanted to maintain some compatibility with the stable version of Emacs (22). I inserted in my .emacs:

(setq running-emacs-23 (> emacs-major-version 22))

(if running-emacs-23
(progn
(set-default-font "Monospace-11")
)
)
(setq inhibit-startup-message t)

NB : The progn is necessary only if one wants several settings. Right now, there is only one. The last line cancels the oh-so-unnerving behaviour of displaying a spash screen for Emacs (since 1993, I pretty well know which editor I get to use when typing emacs in a command line...).