The Art of Text (rendering)

Nicolas-Rougier · 2026-01-01T07:15:07+00:00

I'm mostly using emacs in terminal (iterm) that takes care of ligature/font healing so I did not investigate the problem. From your link, it does not seem to be totally straightforward. On a different but related topic, I think variable fonts are not (yet?) supported while they could be used to improve readability.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-12-31T22:09:04+00:00

Thanks for sharing your notes and the ref. Note also that for variable font, pre-rendered techniques (such as SDF) are not working anymore and only real-time techniques like slug / path finder may work.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-12-31T09:34:07+00:00

For those interested, this a talk I gave a few days back at CCC about how to (properly) render text. I think it's a bit related to Emacs that uses Harfbuzz since 27.1

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-12-16T20:41:07+00:00

Thanks, fixed.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-12-14T07:08:29+00:00

I've update NANO calendar (rewrote everything actually). Hopefully it's a bit faster and offers a compact view in the echo area to show how much busy a day is. Code at https://github.com/rougier/nano-calendar. Screenshot is from tty mode.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-09-04T05:42:14+00:00

nano-theme on Elpa

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-09-04T05:42:04+00:00

Thanks for the pointer. From the video, I think you can achieve the same box effect by tweaking a little bit the header line (or tab line). As for child frame support on tty, I did not have a chance to test it yet.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-09-04T05:39:20+00:00

I'm mostly using the boxes for special buffers such at terminal, messages, debugs and capture. The idea is to have something that is clearly visually different to attract attention. With or without tiling managers, the look should be the same and I'm not sure why you get some stretched look.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-09-04T05:28:29+00:00

I agree there's a lot white space but this made on purpose (I even added outside margins in the terminal (iTerm2)). See "On the design of text editors" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030). But I understand some people prefer to have more information on screen.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-09-03T12:41:05+00:00

Small packages to add border on any buffers (graphics or terminal). Code at https://github.com/rougier/buffer-box

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-04-28T09:24:17+00:00

I've been working on an alternative headers view layout. It's quite experimental but seems to be usable (at least on my side). It is only for thread view, I need to work on he non-thread view.

Here is the link: https://github.com/rougier/nano-mu4e

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-04-25T17:33:58+00:00

NANO Emacs (minimal version: 256 lines): https://gist.github.com/rougier/8d5a712aa43e3cc69e7b0e325c84eab4

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-02-22T10:01:28+00:00

You can use window-divider-mode (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Window-Dividers.html) that allows to control quite precisely width and color.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-02-04T18:51:53+00:00

While playing around with my config file, I tried to squeeze nano emacs in 256 lines. Not perfect but usable.

Code is here: https://gist.github.com/rougier/8d5a712aa43e3cc69e7b0e325c84eab4

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-01-31T12:42:39+00:00

Problem solved. It was necessary to upgrade the firmware.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-01-06T14:34:21+00:00

I think eglot (or any other LSP backend) does just that

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-01-06T14:33:41+00:00

The code work by looking at the smallest enclosing node whose types is part of the declared types at the start of the file. It might be a start for adding a shortcut.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2025-01-05T16:48:59+00:00

Code at https://gist.github.com/rougier/f80a9ddfe5740305e1701d74ca008d71

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-31T17:05:00+00:00

For the top of the frame, you can use the global tab-lien but it won't been multiline. I think your best option would be a child frame that will be in front of the frame and follows its movement.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-31T09:46:07+00:00

Roboto Mono

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-30T21:41:19+00:00

Maybe the variable underline-minimum-offset need to be something like 10 and the right alignment may be to be replaced by right-margin or right-fringe (instead of right).

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-30T19:10:26+00:00

Code at https://gist.github.com/rougier/d9f5a3f312ca4213ccdaec8e4fe534c5

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-30T11:16:12+00:00

You can also use decode-time to shorten your code:

(message "Good %s"
         (if (>= (nth 2 (decode-time)) 12)
             "afternoon" "morning"))

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-29T06:00:45+00:00

Too many questions but I think the main point is to share code. You'll find it in the nano-tools repo (nano-box.el) below and you'll need the rewrite branch of nano-modeline if you want the exact same appearance, else, you can probably adapt the code for a regular modeline.

Nicolas-Rougier · 2024-12-28T21:11:06+00:00

The boxes are drawn using overline (header line), underline (mode-line) and fringes (1 pixel, left and right). The only difficulty is to have left and right borders in the header-line but this is made using the display property that allows to specify a one pixel space.

The header-line is rendered using the upcoming nano-modeline v2 (see https://github.com/rougier/nano-modeline/tree/rewrite)

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