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How to find out current font used in my Emacs?

Braiam
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qazwsx
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4 Answers4

60

In my version of Emacs, I can get the information by entering M-x describe-font.

choroba
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    When doing that, it prompts `Font name (default current choice for ASCII chars): ` What does that mean? What should I do there? – qazwsx May 10 '12 at 18:02
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    @duperuser: I just hit Enter... – choroba May 10 '12 at 18:06
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    This is an answer to the second question, but not the first one. After hitting `Enter`, is the displayed info about the font used for displaying ASCII characters ONLY? If so, how to find out the fonts used for displaying non-ASCII ones? – qazwsx May 10 '12 at 20:34
  • @choroba after hitting enter on M-x describe-font I get "No fonts being used" on the mini-buffer – MarcusJuniusBrutus Sep 09 '13 at 17:18
  • @MenelaosPerdikeas: Are you running emacs in a text terminal? – choroba Sep 09 '13 at 17:46
  • Emacs 25.1 on Windows says `Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable describe-font)`, this worked on Linux though. – NikoNyrh Dec 21 '17 at 09:00
21

Different fonts can be used for different characters and different parts of the buffer. For a given character, you can find out which font was used by moving point to that character than then doing C-u C-x = which will give you all kinds of information about that position in the buffer, including which font was used for it.

Stefan
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    What command is "C-u C-x =" a shortcut to? – qazwsx Dec 04 '17 at 18:14
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    Well, `C-x =` is bound to `what-cursor-position`, but when called with a `C-u` prefix, it mostly delegates the work to `describe-char`. – Stefan Dec 04 '17 at 18:21
  • So without using any keyboard shortcut, how to do the same thing? – qazwsx Dec 04 '17 at 18:28
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    If you limit yourself to the `M-x` shortcut, it would be `M-x describe-char RET`. – Stefan Dec 04 '17 at 18:32
  • So why is `C-x =`/`what-cursor-position` not used? – qazwsx Dec 04 '17 at 18:44
  • You can use that as well, but then you need to pass the `C-u` prefix: `C-u M-x what-cursor-position RET`, otherwise you'll get just very brief data in the echo area, and this doesn't include any font information. – Stefan Dec 04 '17 at 18:51
  • What confuses me is that none of your suggestions include both `what-cursor-position` and `describe-font`. – qazwsx Dec 04 '17 at 20:32
15

You can just evaluate

(face-attribute 'default :font)

To evaluate a sexp, do M-:, type/paste the above sexp in there and hit enter.

Kaushal Modi
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3

Place cursor on text which you want to customize and run M-x describe-face.

It will give you information how this font was set, i.e. markdown-pre-face. You can then see that it inhertis from markdown-code-face which inherits from fixed-pitch.

And this is how you can set it:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil
                    :family "Source Code Pro"
                    :height 130
                    :weight 'normal
                    :width 'normal)
(copy-face 'default 'fixed-pitch)

Restart Emacs after setting it.

rofrol
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