Re: customizing Org for legibility

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Good points Jack - I was going to post something similar.

There are many who use terminal mode for all sorts of reasons which may
not be obvious and which is not just sys admin work. For example, people
who like to use tmux or do pair programming (or paired writing, such as
for co-authoring of papers, presentations etc). Spacemacs has been
growing in popularity for this as well.

My concern here is that we are very much moving into aesthetics and
personal taste. I'm largely with Jack in that I prefer fixed width
fonts. While I agree that variable pitch can make some text look better,
I find the additional complication this brings wrt formatting and
consistent presentation outweighs the small visual improvements. For
similar reasons, I never use visual-line-mode.

I'm not saying we should not have 'mixed' fonts. However, we do need to
ensure this is optional and that it is thoroughly tested - for example,
many people have customised Agenda views. There has been discussion
around how variable pitch can work, but these tend to focus on the
'default' agenda. It is important to be mindful of such assumptions in
order to recognise where changes will need to be implemented as options
you can select rather than defaults you must disable.

It has been some years since I have done anything with Emacs' customize
interface and in particular, custom-face settings, but from memory, it
allowed you to set defaults for both GUI and text based consoles, so it
should be possible to do things in a way which work for both
environments. 

Jack Kamm <jackkamm@gmail.com> writes:

>> One thing I don't understand: It seems that GUI and terminal modes are
>> completely different. Rather than constrain GUI defaults to terminal
>> limitations, it makes sense to gracefully degrade them when a terminal
>> is detected. I assume that terminal users don't care about variable
>> pitch. They're likely doing sysadmin, with little or no prose
>> interaction.
>
> Personally, I run emacs in daemon mode, and often have both GUI and
> terminal emacsclients connected to the same session. So I like to have
> settings that work well in both.
>
> I agree terminal users typically won't want variable pitch, but disagree
> that they are generally doing sysadmin -- I know users who use org-mode
> for their notes, but prefer to use emacs in the terminal.
>
> Speaking to my own preferences -- I prefer fixed-width for editing text,
> whether it's prose or code. For example, if I execute a command to move
> the cursor down 10 lines, I like to know where my cursor is going to end
> up. Fixed-width also works better for certain editing commands, such as
> rectangle commands.
>
> I am not sure what the majority preference is here, but it would be
> interesting to know, and also how it distributes across old-timers and
> newcomers. Ideally, it should be easy to accommodate all preferences,
> with a small amount of configuration and easily discoverable
> documentation.


-- 
Tim Cross