How do I get my Emacs to *always* use 6x13 on X11

Question

I recently declared .emacs bankrupcy and reorganized my init stuff. In the process, I ripped out all the hacky font selection stuff I had accrued over the years, figuring there

Answer 1

You want to set the default frame parameters in your .emacs.

• find out the name of the font you want to use
• add the needed value to the default-frame-alist.

The easiest way, actually, is to use customize and customize default-frame-alist, but can also use elisp and write

(setq default-frame-alist 
   '(font . "-*-*-medium-r-normal--16-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-hiramin_w6"))

That's stolen from my emacs, you'll need to find the full font name (xfontsel?) for the font you want.

See also the EmacsWiki on setting fonts and faces.

Answer 2

I control this stuff from my .Xresources file.

Personally I have

emacs.reverseVideo:     true
emacs.font:             7x13bold

(And I quite agree... long live the bitmap fonts! I'll take my xterm with

XTerm*foreground:       green
XTerm*background:       black
XTerm*font:             7x13bold

... over the Gnome terminal any day).

If you're playing with .Xresources from within a session, xrdb command is useful to reload them.

Answer 3

For anyone reading this with a recent Linux distribution you will have to install 6x13 first (yes, sounds obvious..). There are instructions here for Ubuntu/Debian which should work on other distros too if you skip the apt-getting of random fonts. Install the "FixedSC" .tgz from there (it unpacks to /usr/local/share/fonts) then follow the instructions to add it to the font cache so it will appear in the Gnome Font selection dialog.