Duct Tape And Turing Machines

I upgraded to the development-and-nearing release branch of Emacs about a week ago. It’s quite stable and has a bevy of shiny features: Steve Yegge talks at length about the new ability to embed lisp expressions into replace-regexp commands. The greatest thing for me so far, however, has been ability to use antialiased fonts. Behold!

Emacs 21, default font:

Emacs 23, using XFT and the ProFont font:

That sigh of relief you just heard was my eyeballs.

Installing the development version under Linux is largely dependent on your distribution: under Gentoo, you’ll need to add =app-editors/emacs-cvs-23* to /etc/portage/packages.unmask, then run emerge emacs-cvs. It seems it’s necessary to turn on the xft backend on the command line, so a simple alias in your .bashrc ought to do the trick:

alias emacs='emacs-23.0.0 --enable-font-backend --font "ProFont-11"'

If you’re stuck using Windows (like I am at work), then check out EmacsW32. It’s a nice packaging of Emacs for Windows that’s built against stable cvs snapshots. For you OS X users, I’ve had great success using Emacs.app on the Powerbook I use for road-hacking.