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Emacs and XEmacs configuration
Here are some Emacs configuration files for low vision (large fonts, saving screen real-estate, and dark backgrounds) with many Emacs features supported.
Due to the number of settings involved, I've split them across several files. You can download all of these files as a gzipped tar archive emacs.tgz and unpack it in your home directory (tar -zxf emacs.tgz), taking care first to save any previous configuration that you want to keep.
The above configuration is meant for:
- FSF Emacs 23 through 29, in high-resolution GNU/Linux (standard packages), Mac OS X (Carbon or Aquamacs), and Windows (binary download from GNU)
- FSF Emacs 22 (some Mac OS X machines have only this version)
- XEmacs 21 with bitmap fonts, in older Linux distributions with low-resolution scrollable desktops (I haven't used this since 2015)
- Terminal mode in any of the above
On a Mac in 2020 I was able to install FSF Emacs 27.1 even on old OS X 10.7 via MacPorts' sudo port install emacs-mac-app, but MacPorts dropped pre-10.10 support for Emacs in 2022 (port upgrade fails without removing the old version). Earlier versions of Emacs had more bugs: there's a crash in Mac Emacs 23 and 24 (and Aquamacs) involving the menubar and FTP buffers (here's a patch to 24.3rc3 I submitted); the bug is not present in Emacs 22 (but that lacks some of 23+'s functionality) and was fixed in Emacs 24.4 but that introduced another bug (albeit a less serious one) regarding use of the non-leftmost pull-down menus when zoom is in effect, which was still present in various forms as late as 26.1 (the last precompiled binary to work on older 10.7 Macs), but is gone in 27.1 if you can compile that with MacPorts.
If you are using the even older XEmacs 21, it might occasionally "mess up" the fonts: if that happens, try M-x fix-fonts. Also in XEmacs, if you can't zoom in, try M-x pc-default-font-bigger or M-x pc-default-font-double (if the result is too big for the screen, M-x smaller-frame, M-x even-smaller-frame or M-x very-small-frame).
Look through the .el files for other user functions and things you can customise.
If you're on a machine that has only vim, I do also
have a .vimrc file.
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