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By default, Emacs displays text in the font named `9x15', which makes each character nine pixels wide and fifteen pixels high. You can specify a different font on your command line through the option `-fn name' (or `--font', which is an alias for `-fn').
Under X, each font has a long name which consists of eleven words or numbers, separated by dashes. Some fonts also have shorter nicknames—`9x15' is such a nickname. You can use either kind of name. You can use wildcard patterns for the font name; then Emacs lets X choose one of the fonts that match the pattern. Here is an example, which happens to specify the font whose nickname is `6x13':
emacs -fn "-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-*-*-*-c-60-iso8859-1" &
You can also specify the font in your .Xdefaults file:
emacs.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-*-*-*-c-60-iso8859-1
A long font name has the following form:
-maker-family-weight-slant-widthtype-style... ...-pixels-height-horiz-vert-spacing-width-charset
You will probably want to use a fixed-width default font—that is,
a font in which all characters have the same width. Any font with
`m' or `c' in the spacing field of the long name is a
fixed-width font. Here's how to use the xlsfonts
program to
list all the fixed-width fonts available on your system:
xlsfonts -fn '*x*' | egrep "^[0-9]+x[0-9]+" xlsfonts -fn '*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-m*' xlsfonts -fn '*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-c*'
To see what a particular font looks like, use the xfd
command.
For example:
xfd -fn 6x13
displays the entire font `6x13'.
While running Emacs, you can set the font of the current frame (see Frame Parameters) or for a specific kind of text (see Faces).