How to change the font in Emacs for Windows?

04
2013-09
  • Javier Badia

    I'm following this Lisp tutorial, which provides you with a Lisp interpreter and Emacs to make setting stuff up easier. However, I want to change the font, and everything Google has given me involves putting some cryptic lisp commands in a file, or pressing some key combination, or giving it a long font name, and they're all pretty complicated.

    Is there any way to simply open a font selection dialog or something like that? Or maybe a simple command to use? Keep in mind I'm a beginner.

    • Answers
  • Nifle

    Shift-LeftClick in a buffer and you'll get a font dialog. Select

    Change Buffer Font...

    This will only last until emacs is shut-down though.

    Under the Options in the menubar you have Set Default Font... Dont forget to select Save Options after. (it's right below Set Default Font)

    And as an aside. EmacsW32 is the emacs I recommend for windows

  • Richard Hoskins

    If you are using Emacs 23 put this in your init.el:

    (setq default-frame-alist 
     (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "Envy Code R-18")))

    Substituting "Comic sans" or whatever for "Envy Code R-18".

    There is also "M-x customize", which puts you into a menu based customization mode. Some people find that easier than fuzting with lisp; I don't.


    • Related Question

    Windows: How to change the system/dialog font?
  • Ashwin

    I switched over to Cleartype on Windows XP about 3 years ago. And in the Theme settings I used Vista (made-for-Cleartype) fonts for all the UI widgets.

    However, certain system dialogs of Windows and Windows utilities still show up in the older Windows font. That now looks butt-ugly under Cleartype. Anyone knows how to change this system font too?


    • Related Answers
  • Daniel Rikowski

    Sometimes the font is hard-coded into the application.

    In that case you have no chance to change their font through the global Windows settings.

    Remember when Microsoft decided to lighten the dialog background color a little bit? (Windows 2000/ME) Suddenly many applications had dialogs with a mixture of dark and light gray colors. (Most times when glyphs/icons were not transparent and instead had the old dialog color background)