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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

This is the first step only. I remember in 1995 Stallman wanted Emacs to be "like Microsoft Word" with varying fonts and other formatting shit with hidden Tex-coding. Do it.

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He still wants Emacs to become a general-purpose word processor.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-03/msg00...

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-04/msg01...

And not everybody is happy about it. [Careful, flame ahead.]

http://ergoemacs.org/misc/rms_emacs_tyrant_2018-03.html

I do not understand the want to stick with fixed-width fonts in this day and age. We do not use the editor to punch cards anymore, nor do we type text on a character-cell terminal or a typewriter. With the high-resolution displays, code we write should look more like one that is found in some nice programming books - complete with bold-faced reserved words, italicized comments, and even some mathematical typesetting. This could even (re)open the path to the Holy Grail of literate programming!

Could you link to some non-monospace font rendering that you find accessible and attractive?

In my experience, code in non-monospace fonts are hard to read and is hard to navigate because the letters don't line up.

You can do that with many Emacs themes, but have you tried to read those things for a longer time? I like uniform text with minimal highlighting and I know many developers prefer the same - it is much easier for eyes. Some prefer to have a circus of fonts, colors and sizes. YMMV.

In future PyLyx-mode the code is monospace, but comments are assumed to be Tex-formatted. Imagine implementation of some mathematical formula. You can have the description with proper notation. It will be so beautiful that it brings tears to my eyes already.

> nor do we type text on a character-cell terminal

Yes we do. Command line interfaces are as popular as ever and all terminal emulators rely on a fixed-width fonts.

Well, then, the question is, why on Earth we are still emulating ancient character-cell terminals? What purpose does this serve? (I think I just might know the answer: so we could run fixed-width font based text editors in them!)

> I do not understand the want to stick with fixed-width fonts in this day and age.

Usually it involves alignment issues. Some people neatly align array entries, etc, and variable width fonts makes this look ugly. Also, people often put ASCII diagrams, etc in the comments, which are screwed up by non-monospace fonts.

> This could even (re)open the path to the Holy Grail of literate programming!

The Leo Editor[1] is your friend. It's the only such editor that seems to do it well. And by well, I mean "poor experience, but better than all the others."

[1] https://leoeditor.com/

> diagrams

It would seem that being able to simply insert an image (or some kind of a link to one - similar to what you can do in HTML) would serve the purpose much better).

It definitely does, and I can do this in Emacs with Org Mode. However, I cannot convince the world to use Emacs and Org Mode. I appreciate Noah's frustration.

You can already have varying fonts in Emacs. Not quite in a word-processor-like way (thankfully!).

o-org-mode?

customized like this https://lepisma.xyz/2017/10/28/ricing-org-mode/ or like this https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs

> like this https://github.com/rougier/elegant-emacs

OMG that is beautiful

So like LyX?

I guess so. Me no Stallman, but I want standard Emacs with graphical Lyx-mode.

Or perhaps TeXmacs?

http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Stallman is delusional and his push to make Emacs a WYSIWYG editor almost killed it.

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