Keeping font size everywhere

What happened?

I have multiple monitors that are 2k and my main one that is 4k. The font size is set for the 2k ones and for the 4k I wrote this function that I invoke manually with M-x

(defun numkem/set-font-main-screen ()
  (interactive)
  (set-frame-font "-PfEd-Fantasque Sans Mono-normal-normal-normal-*-27-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1"))

When writing a commit message with magit or opening a new frame (through emacsclient -c) the font size of the frame gets reset.

What did you expect to happen?

The font size should stay the same.

Steps to reproduce

1 - Use the function above within a frame. 2 - Write a commit message or open a new frame with emacsclient -c

System information


Loading data dump...

See C-h f set-frame-font for documentation. Particularly for the FRAMES argument.

(set-frame-font FONT &optional KEEP-SIZE FRAMES INHIBIT-CUSTOMIZE)

…

If FRAMES is nil, apply the font to the selected frame only. If FRAMES is non-nil, it should be a list of frames to act upon, or t meaning all existing graphical frames. Also, if FRAMES is non-nil, alter the user’s Customization settings as though the font-related attributes of the default face had been "set in this session", so that the font is applied to future frames.

That said, using set-frame-font at all (especially with an xlfd font string) is usually not the best option. I recommend setting doom-font with a floating point :size instead:

;;; in $DOOMDIR/config.el
(setq doom-font (font-spec :family "Fantasque Sans Mono" :size 27.0))

Then your font setting will scale better between low/hi-dpi displays better. Emacs interprets integers as a pixel size and floats as a point size.

Here are two other alternatives:

  • doom-big-font-mode (on SPCtb) to “zoom” in text temporarily – great for streaming, for example. See C-hvdoom-big-font to tweak it.
  • doom/increase-font-size and doom/decrease-font-size (and doom/reset-font-size). I hope these are self-explanatory.
1 Like

Thank you for the reply, using a flot with doom-font helped quite a bit but now I have the reverse problem of having the smaller screen being too big while the 4k is just right.

Unfortunately it seems like doom/increase-font-size affects all frames, it it was only for the current frame it would be very helpful and might fix my problem.

Would there be a way to set the font size based on the screen name? I’ve seen frame-monitors-attributes and adding set-frame-font to the window-size-change-functions hook but I got inconsistent results.

What are others doing when using monitors with different sizes?

If you use wayland, you can have different scaling per output. This would scale everything to be a „better“ size on the large screen, not just the Emacs fonts.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.