LWN: Comments on "Emacs 22.1 released"

page 41 has graphs but I'm nore sure I can read them

allesfresser — 2007-06-07T15:43:19+00:00

I'm not sure what the study says, but if you're in a relatively dark environment, my intuition says that your pupils will be more stopped down with the bright screen (white background), and therefore have more depth of field, making it easier to focus, and thus less eyestrain. Of course if you're starting to have cataracts, you'll have more glare from the bright screen. But hopefully you don't have to deal with that. :)

page 41 has graphs but I'm nore sure I can read them

coriordan — 2007-06-07T13:53:43+00:00

Page 41 of that document has graphs which talk about eyestrain, but I'm not used to reading graphs like those.

550 lx is the reading when the work was done in a room with the lights on, and 5 lx is the reading when the work was done in a room with the lights off. I guess the y-axis scales, from 0 to 20, with 20 being high levels of eyestrain. The light grey (positive) is using a bright background, and the dark grey (negative) is with a dark background.

So, have I read correctly that that study is saying that eyestrain is worse when using light text on a dark background?

Thanks, I'll look for longevity

coriordan — 2007-06-07T12:03:34+00:00

Thanks for that link, I'll give it a read.

But my main concern is what state my eyes will be after 30 years of staring at a white screen or a black screen. If you know any info about that, I'd be glad to hear it.

I have no good evidence to go on, so I just guess that since staring at a light buld makes your eyes sore quickly, and staring at a white LCD is more similar to staring at a light bulb than staring at a black LCD is, the black is probably better.

light foreground on dark background vs. dark foreground on light background

zooko — 2007-06-06T13:54:36+00:00

P.S. See page 39 of

http://www.psycho.uni-duesseldorf.de/abteilungen/aap/Doku...

for the basic result -- you can catch about a third more errors in a proofreading task with light-on-dark than with dark-on-light. It is a very well designed and well executed study, so I have confidence in the result.

light foreground on dark background vs. dark foreground on light background

zooko — 2007-06-06T13:47:59+00:00

There's no arguing about aesthetic taste, of course, but you should know that on modern LCD displays, using dark text on a light background allows people to catch about four thirds as many errors in a text as using light text on a dark background.

http://www.psycho.uni-duesseldorf.de/abteilungen/aap/Doku...

Certainly back when we used CRTs a dark background was easier on the eyes, because CRTs flicker, and more/brighter area exacerbates that problem.

Very 1990s

coriordan — 2007-06-06T08:06:52+00:00

On the Emacs tour page there is a series of screenshots of GNU Emacs 22.

I prefer a black background though. Easier on the eyes, IMO.

And v22 can use variable width fonts, if you like that.

screen shot?

zooko — 2007-06-06T06:00:40+00:00

Oh wait, after I posted that I remembered that I wanted to try variable-width font again. Here it is with Deja Sans 13pt instead of Deja San Mono 11pt.

https://yumyum.zooko.com:32325/pub/2007-06-05-235453_1600...

screen shot?

zooko — 2007-06-06T05:52:24+00:00

I'm a happy user of XEmacs (currently using the unstable version 21.5.27), but I would be interested in experimenting with emacs, if it isn't still as ugly as it was last time I looked (years ago). Here is a screen shot of my XEmacs:

https://yumyum.zooko.com:32325/pub/2007-06-05-212806_1600...

(Like all screenshots, you won't see the same kind of thing I see if you aren't viewing it on a similar display, i.e. an LCD. If there is sub-pixel rendering in this screen shot (I'm not sure) then your LCD also has to have the same pixel order as mine -- RGB.)

I'm very happy with the appearance of this version of XEmacs (it is much better than the one I used to use -- the current stable release of XEmacs).

German should be fine

coriordan — 2007-06-05T11:34:50+00:00

I don't have problems using Emacs 22 for documents with euro symbols or with acute accents over letters. When I open files, the funny characters display fine, and after I edit the files, the accents are still fine. So it is probably something wrong with your distro or Emacs installation.

If you do M-x view-hello-file, you will see what character sets are working. For me, Amharic, Georgian, Hindi, Tamil, and two or three other writing systems don't display correctly, but Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German ("Grüß Gott") all display fine.

use it with TERM set to xterm-256color

smitty_one_each — 2007-06-05T11:03:37+00:00

Donnie: http://www.emacswiki.org

22 is quite better than 21

coriordan — 2007-06-05T10:38:07+00:00

I've been using a CVS build for almost a year now and it's a big improvement on Emacs 21. The default settings are much friendlier, the macros system is more convenient, functions exist for even more commonly-done things, and the interface is improved.

use it with TERM set to xterm-256color

dberkholz — 2007-06-05T05:07:51+00:00

I'm a fairly new emacs user, and this is one of the best tips I've seen (besides how to activate syntax highlighting in the first place, which is on by default in 22.1). Thanks!

use it with TERM set to xterm-256color

dann — 2007-06-05T00:07:16+00:00

If you use emacs in a tty, and you use a not too old terminal emulator, then set TERM to xter-256color for much better syntax highlighting in that configuration.

Emacs 22.1 released

khim — 2007-06-04T18:52:00+00:00

Emacs supported UTF-8 for years. But only for simple scripts. Unicode-2 branch is complete rework of internals and, of course, it includes Xft support so it works much better, but for simple scripts existing Emacs is enough, 22.1 is not needed...

Emacs 22.1 released

asamardzic — 2007-06-04T18:24:19+00:00

There are several settings involved here:
- first, you need to select UTF-8 font for Emacs
- then, you need to select UTF-8 as Emacs language environment ("C-x RET l", then "UTF-8")
- then you could load your UTF-8 text file, and you should be able to see UTF-8 glyphs properly
- finally, if you'd like to edit the file, you need to select "input method" ("C-x RET C-\", and then type in your preferred input method)

Of course, all of above could be automated (for example, I'm doing first thing trough my ~/.Xdefaults file, regarding second thing I have (set-language-environment "UTF-8") in my ~/.emacs file, etc.).

Emacs 22.1 released

andre68 — 2007-06-04T18:00:06+00:00

Well, my opinion of utf8-compliant is, that is shows the utf8 characters in the right manner when editing an utf8 document. I just tried emacs-22.1.1 and this is not the case. I need utf8 mainly for editing german umlauts and the euro sign. If I'm wrong, and there is a setting for doing this, I would really be happy. The UNIX file command says "UTF-8 Unicode text" for my files, so it should work if emacs supports utf8 correctly, shouldn't it?

Emacs 22.1 released

ajross — 2007-06-04T17:33:57+00:00

To be clear: my understanding is that 22.x *does* support UTF8 locales and encodings. The unicode branch denotes, I think, an internals rework to represent everything as utf8, and therefore simply things.

I'm not an emacs hacker, though, so hopefully others can fill in whatever I missed or got wrong. As I said, I just use it for the pretty fonts. :)

Emacs 22.1 released

andre68 — 2007-06-04T17:21:34+00:00

Ack! The main feature I was really looking forward for was support for unicode. What a pity, that it did not make its way into this release. This means another long wait. Currently I've to workaround this by calling iconv before and after the call of emacs which is nasty.

Emacs 22.1 released

ajross — 2007-06-04T16:47:03+00:00

The saddest thing is that I'll probably never use this release. I've been running a build from the "emacs-unicode-2" branch in CVS for the past year or so because of the Xft support, which didn't make it into the 22.x line. The CVS code works great, FWIW. I just don't want to think about how long it'll be until it makes it into a numbered version, though...