I keep forgetting to update this blog. I feel bad about that; I thought that I would have more free time after I finished taking classes. I am going to try to force myself to update more frequently. I won't force myself to make the content insightful, though.
Anyway, I have been writing code in Haskell lately, and the haskell-mode for emacs is very good. This mode has support for replacing common multi-character operators and identifiers with their Unicode equivalents. For example, -> becomes →. The replacement is done only at the level of the text renderer; the underlying file still has the original multi-character ASCII sequences. While this feature is far from necessary, it makes scanning code more pleasant. There is only one problem: my programming font (Anonymous Pro) does not have full glyph coverage for the Unicode symbols that haskell-mode uses.
Emacs notices this, of course, and uses another font to render these symbols. Unfortunately, whatever font it picks is 1) ugly and 2) the wrong size. I eventually figured out that emacs uses fontsets to determine the search order for glyphs; I modified my default fontset to prioritize a better looking and more appropriately-sized font for Unicode symbols. The hardest part was figuring out the second argument to this function: TARGET. I still haven't found a definitive list of the possible values of this argument, but I found enough examples to at least let me fix my problem:
(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'ucs "dejavu sans mono-11")
I also tried ghc-mod, which extends haskell-mode with some more interactive features using ghc (or hlint). It is very impressive and can offer syntax checking, useful symbol completion, type signature inference, and documentation lookup. Unfortunately it automatically saves the buffer you are working on whenever emacs is idle so that it can redo the syntax check. I found this to be incredibly annoying and had to disable the mode. Perhaps future versions will allow the auto-save to be disabled. If the saving doesn't bother you, though, it is an impressive aid to Haskell development.