emacs weird characters on splash screen - emacs

I've recently downloaded emacs 24.2 for windows (i'm running vista 64bits) as my first attempt at emacs. When i start it up the characters in the splash screen as well as the tooltips for the menu items are all weird.
My guess is that the character (encodings?) is somehow messed up.
Here's a screenshot of my splash screen
Thanks for trying to help me out, i appreciate it.
summary:
- my splash screen shows weird characters
- so do the tooltips for my buttons
- i downloaded emacs 24.2 for windows from here
- Can you help me get it showing english language?

To find what the problem font is, put the cursor on one of the gibberish characters in the splash screen, and press C-u C-x =. If you can't read the buffer that comes up, then save it with C-x C-w, and view the file in some other editor.
For me, the following font is used, and it displays OK:
uniscribe:-outline-Arial-normal-normal-normal-sans-15-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1 (#x3A)

I will answer everybody in this comment (not sure if it's the proper etiquette of stackoverflow).
I've managed to fix the problem manually.
Emacs was using this font for me:
uniscribe:-outline-Helvetica-normal-normal-normal-mono-13-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1 (#x73) and face: variable-pitchI edited the font family of the face from Sans-serif to Arial which fixed the problem.
Thanks to #wvxwv and #JSON for helping me with the key shortcuts and advice.
Thanks to #Chris Barret for helping me out.
And thanks to #itlodge for suggeting unicad

I suggest you use unicad.
It can solve the coding system problem automatically.

Related

Change size of whitespace tab arrow character in VS Code

I am currently setting up VS Code on a new computer and want to maintain all the same configuration, addons etc that I had on my previous computer. I was able to copy all of the settings, fonts, themes I like, etc; however for some reason I can't figure out how to change the size of the Tab arrow character for whitespace.
In my old editor, the Tab arrow spanned two spaces, whereas on my new computer, the tab arrow only spans one space.
I've been looking all over, and tried googling any variation of "change tab character size", "modify tab arrow span" etc that I could think of. I seem to remember changing the arrow size at some years ago, which is how I got it in my old editor, but I've totally forgotten, and can't find the setting anywhere, neither searching in the VS Code settings, nor on google like I mentioned; the only things that turn up are for changing tab indent size from 2, to 4 spaces etc.
Here are some screenshots of what I mean, from the new VS Code editor and from the one on my older computer:
Current tab arrow size in VS Code:
Old tab arrows size (what I want in my new editor):
This is driving me crazy, and I'm sure it's a simple setting somewhere that I'm missing. Any help would be appreciated!
Edit: In case it is relevant, I'm using JetBrains Mono as my font, and its the same version of the font as from my old computer as well, I copied it over and installed it on the new PC.
To my shock, the issue resolved itself after rebooting my PC. Once again it would seem that the tried and true "have you tried turning it off and on again" continues to ring true in many cases.
The only explanation I can think of is that perhaps some of the font symbols for whitespace characters weren't fully updated for some reason after installing the JetBrains Mono font, which I had installed earlier the same day, and after rebooting my PC I guess all the characters were fully updated/refreshed, and now the longer arrow is displayed for the tabs; I guess this also means that there is no arrow resizing per se, and the arrow symbol for the tab is simply the font symbol.
In any case, I figured I should write this update as an answer in case something like this happens to anyone else in the future.

vscode on mac is incorrectly highlighting text around text blocks

It is very annoying to see that background around code is lighter then the rest of the program. When the cursor moves the highlighting moves up and down to full window width. Can you please propose solution how to turn this highlighting off. Same problem is in output of task log, and in file explorer.
I have deleted all the settings and Application data and I have same problem. I have installed vscode on windows and I do not have this problem with same settings.
Unfortunately this is an issue in Chromium. You can work around this by starting VS Code with --disable-gpu from the command line.
Sean
It appears this can be fixed for some users by selecting a different color profile in macOS display settings. Note that you have to change this separately for all monitors that you use.
For me, "Apple RGB" will show these blocks, and switching to "LED Cinema Display" or "iMac" solves the issue.
See also: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/12473#issuecomment-269024219

How do I fix this random behavior with my Emacs mode line?

I am running Emacs 23.3 on Windows XP. When Emacs is started, the mode line will assume one of these two appearances at random. Needless to say, I prefer the first one. How do I figure out what is going on and how do I make the first one stick?
The images don't show it, but the first one has a GUI type appearance. If I hover over the various bits of text with a mouse, e.g. Help then the text Help turns into a button with shadows etc.
The black mode line appears to be a text mode widget. The only thing that the mouse will change on it is the highlighting.
PS: Thanks JSON!
I vaguely remember this happening years ago depending on whether or not I started Emacs from Remote Desktop. Perhaps there's an issue with color depth?
See if anything has changed your settings to
(set-face-background 'modeline "#000000")
(set-face-foreground 'modeline "#FFFFFF")
(EDIT: Color codes corrected) in any of your .el files.

Letterspacing in GNU Emacs

I'm using GNU Emacs on 64bit Ubuntu. Monaco font works well, except the gap between each letter is too wide, thus causing each line of codes to spread too widely. I thought maybe it was a problem with the font, but then Ubuntu terminal was capable of handling the exactly same font with a narrower horizontal margin.
Is there any method I can try to adjust the horizontal linespacing in Emacs?
Have you checked that Emacs and terminal really display the font differently? In your screenshot, the font size itself in Emacs is bigger.
Anyways, you can choose different spacing values when setting a font by appending them to the font name, e.g. "Monaco-10:spacing=110". Try if you can get the behaviour you want this way.
EDIT: Maybe the second paragraph of my answer should be disregarded. I basically guessed this based on the output of describe-font, but further experiments with it didn't yield satisfying results.
Try:
M-x customize-face
At the prompt enter "default"
I adjust the font-width from medium to condensed and see if that helps.
Otherwise you might just try a different font. SHIFT + Mouse-1 should bring up a menu where you can change the default font from Courier.
I suffer the same problem, but then I googled into this post:
http://www.gringod.com/2006/11/01/new-version-of-monaco-font/
it definitely solves my issue.
The fix is rather simple, download the linux version of Monaco font and everything would be fine. :)

How to scroll down on pages in doc-view mode in Emacs?

I have recently started using doc-view in Emacs, but I am having quite a few problems with it. The main one is that I can't scroll down on pages. I can see the next or previous page using "n" or "p", but the commands to scroll up and down a page, which are supposedly SPACE and DEL, do not work. Well, to be fair, DEL works, but it goes to the previous page rather than scroll up to the bottom of the previous page. The result is that I can only see the top of the pdf pages, but not the bottom parts.
I tried changing the view to continuous, but that doesn't work either. This is what I tried changing:
I did check the customisations for doc-view, but the variables (or options, or whatever they are called) did not appear to me to be the ones which would solve my problem.
More information: I did manage to make SPACE and DEL work at some point, but I don't remember what I did, and I can't get it to work again. I am using Aquamacs.
Any ideas?
By the way, another problem I have is that doc-view causes Aquamacs to sort of crash, meaning it freezes everything, keeps "thinking", and I have to force quit Aquamacs to get it to work again. While this is not my main question, if anyone can tell me anything about this I would also appreciate.
Thanks!
EDIT: I tried what the answer below suggested, it didn't work, kept trying other things/commands, and then C-n and SPACE started working! I quit Aquamacs, started it again, opened a pdf document, and it is back to not working. Can someone please explain what is happening? How can I make this reliable?
(setq doc-view-continuous t)
This lets you scroll the whole document with mouse wheel(not just the current page).
To commands to scroll down are bind to:
C-n, down
not SPC
UPDATE:
SPC is rebound in docview mode. Can't reproduce you issue using GNU Emacs/Linux, can you invoke:
M-x doc-view-scroll-down-or-previous-page