Emacs-22+ doesn’t support Xft fonts, hence the look and feel of emacs on X-Windows is not that good. But development is going on to provide this feature in emacs. The emacs-unicode-2 branch for emacs has this feature, hopefully this will get integrated to emacs-23.
I followed the following steps to compile emacs-unicode from CVS.
1. Checkout latest source for emacs-unicode.
cd /opt cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co -r emacs-unicode-2 emacs
2. I had a problem with NSTATICS constant in emacs/src/alloc.c when compiling. I think you might face the same problem. You have to change the value of this constant. You have to look for the definition of this constant in emacs/src/alloc.c. I did the following. May be a lower value will also work. Commented the existing definition and added mine.
/* #define NSTATICS 1280 */ #define NSTATICS 2048
3. Now use configure script to generate make files.
cd /opt/emacs ./configure --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype
4. At last the make command
make bootstrap
It took around 5 hours for me to figure out the NSTATICS problem. I hope this will help some of you. If this helps any one of you then drop me a mail. I will be happy.