Tim Chase wrote:
set guifont=Lucida_Console:h10
"Courier:h10" also works but other common fonts like
"Arial:h10" don't work. Is that because they are not
mono spaced?
Courier_New (a fixed-width TrueType font) is usually better-looking (if not by
much) than Courier (a bitmapped font). Also, Courier_New usually has a richer
repertoire of foreign-language glyphs than many other fonts. See below how to
find out which fonts are acceptable to Vim and try them out.
gVim's only happy with monospaced fonts. I've heard rumors of being
able to coerce it to used other fonts, but the results are usually
pretty ugly.
:help e236
for more on that.
Vim must have a fixed-width font, except the GTK2 version, which doesn't run
on Windows (it's one of the flavours of GUI for X11); and even then,
non-monospaced fonts are indeed pretty ugly in Vim since it uses a fixed
character cell: narrow letters like i would have too much space around them,
and wide letters like m might get clipped at right.
If I find a font which I like, must I put it into
Windows' Fonts directory, yes?
It must be accessible like fonts in any other program in Windows which
generally means putting them in the system-wide fonts directory. I
don't know if Win32 offers a means for a non-priv'ed user to add fonts
to the system by putting them in some magic directory in their own
branch of the "Documents and Settings" folder.
But then I need to work out the syntax for it in
_gvimrc. How do I work it out? OK, a space in Windows
is probably an underscore, but is there anything else
I need look out for?
The easiest way is to simply use
:set guifont=*
and pick the font you want/like. Then, simply issue
:set guifont?
and Vim will tell you what it wants. There are a variety of characters
that need to be escaped (spaces, commas, backslashes) all described in
:help guifont
-tim
Or, once you have what you like, type
:set guifont=<Tab>
(i.e., hit the tab key after the equal sign). Vim will fill-in your current
setting, with escaping backslashes if and where needed. On Windows there
usually aren't many for the 'guifont' option, since spaces can be replaced by
underscore. You can edit the value in-place (then Enter to accept or Esc to
cancel) if you're not 100% satisfied; or if you are, write the line down and
copy that verbatim to your gvimrc.
Best regards,
Tony.
