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Comment by daleharvey | Hacker News Reader

I love emacs, and although I have long tried switching to other editors (I am fairly determined to use web based applications only, brackets is getting close) I havent been able to replace it yet.

However its the only application I didnt know how to copy and paste in when I started using it, its still the only application I use that I dont know how to resize the text in.

It would be kinda nice to see people work on those type of things.

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Try this:

    (defun set-font (font-family height)
      (interactive "sFont family: \nnHeight: ")
      (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family font-family :height height)
      (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode font-family))

Then, if you have the right font installed, the following will work:

    (set-font "Monaco" 140) ; for 14-pt Monaco

or, e.g.,

    (set-font "Anonymous" 120) ; for 12-pt Anonymous

(M-x set-font also works.)

> I am fairly determined to use web based applications only

That sounds really unpleasant to me. Why on earth would you want to do that?

Because I likely dont think the things you relate to web software being unpleasant are inherent to the actual platform and can be fixed, both by 3rd parties producing better web based software and by the platforms themselves being fixed.

That combined with the advantages of having a single, cross platform runtime platform that is shared as opposed to owned as being too important to ignore, I think its silly that people have to consider writing the same app 3 times at a minimum to reach a reasonable portion of the audience.

My biggest issue with web apps is that I don't have control of the software -- someone else can unilaterally decide to change the interface or functionality from day to day. (GMail is an example of a case that regularly irritates me by doing this.)

While I appreciate what you're saying about a common, open runtime being valuable -- I've considered using a self-contained, special purpose browser as the GUI for a project before myself -- I feel like web apps give users less freedom ultimately. Even in the worst case proprietary desktop app with nasty DRM, I could resort to reverse engineering the executable on my machine to find out what it does if I really had to; as soon as you move the computation to a remote server, you're totally at the whim of the operator for the continued ability to even access the program.

Edit: Removed redundant phrasing.

Seems like Firefox OS' packaged web apps (shipped as a zip file) solves those issues without losing the common runtime benefits.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Publishing/Packaged...

If you just want a common runtime, what's wrong with java apps (or the CLR or similar efforts)?

(I mean yes, performance sucks and swing looks terribly ugly, but those were once the same problems on the web; they're not unsolvable by any means)

If you just want a common runtime, what's wrong with java apps

Oracle v. Google. By CLR I assume you mean the CLI, but only a fool would trust a "standard" controlled by MS and driven by a proprietary implementation, not to mention that the latest version doesn't even have a patent promise from them.

Oracle lost the lawsuit, except for the part where Google literally copied one of their classes.

And all they had to do was pay Keker & Van Nest for two years, without knowing whether they'd win or not - and Google didn't even make a VM that can run Java apps!

Not to mention that Oracle has appealed, so we still don't know if Google is clear or not.

If you want to risk getting yourself or your company involved in that quagmire, by all means do so.

This is FUD, pure and simple. Anyone can be sued for anything.

Oracle has already - and is currently - suing for implementing a competing JVM. It's not FUD to suggest they might do it again.

FUD is what Oracle is doing; blame them, not me.

Thats exactly what I meant by something that is not inherent to the platform, The example I used (brackets) is an application built primarily using web technologies that isnt served from a website / you have complete control over.

C-x C-+ increases font size, C-x C-- decreases font size if that's what you were looking for.

Heh C-+ / C-- actually work, at least in my emacsforosx, have no idea when that started working, but nice, one complaint off my list, but its not hard to imagine many more to make emacs more user friendly

Note that these keys zoom, they don't change the font size. Useful for displaying, not useful if you're looking to export or print text.

Well, yeah. The whole point of a text editor it to edit plain text.

> However its the only application I didnt know how to copy and paste in when I started using it, its still the only application I use that I dont know how to resize the text in.

Ah, you must have never tried vim. :)

heh good point, 'use' in this context means more than the brief panic on a new machine when I remember :wq and add export EDITOR=emacs to my profile

It's got a very nice way of handling text size and other text "attributes". All the various kinds ("faces") of text are arranged in an inheritance hierarchy, so a change in the size of the text in the base of the hierarchy propagates to all of the text in the application (minus the size of the text in the title bar, which is of course controlled by the operating system).

So for example, to make all Emacs text (except the title-bar text) pretty darn big, you just eval the following:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 200)

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