Emacs on OS/X

I like emacs. Some people like 6, but I prefer emacs. However, the build of emacs 21.3.50 from the GNU CVS repository doesn't use a reasonable monospaced mac OS/X fonts by default on 10.3/Panther, even though it's supposed to. The font used on the initial window just sucks, since it's interpolated. Full of jaggies.

How to fix?

Add this to your .emacs file:
(set-frame-font "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-m-100-mac-roman")

You can see all the fonts in the system that emacs thinks are there by typing:
M-x set-frame-font ?

And you'll probably find something you like.

Monospaced fonts are best for code, but optima is really nice too.

Powerbook fun

OK - so, my 17" powerbook G4 came with 512mb memory standard. The machine felt slow... and watching the output of "vm_stat 2" in a console window explained why - it was paging!

Today, I dropped in a 1gb DIMM, so the box now has 1.5gb of memory. Yowza - what a difference. The machine feels faster, and vm-stat(1) indicates that there's oodles of free pages left.

I think Panther - meaning the kernel, window system, and Finder, all want to have about half-a-gig to themselves. If you want to then do something like, say, actually DO WORK on the machine, or god forbid, run a java IDE, you definately want more than half a gig of RAM in the box.