Using proportional fonts in Emacs org mode

Most of my writing, prose or code, happens in the monospaced-font-by-default Emacs. While I’d been hanging on to anachronistic monospaced aesthetic, I’m coming back around to the readability of a well-kerned proportional font.

To this end, I switched this blog’s fonts from monospace to proportional fonts a few months back, and I wanted to do the same with Emacs org-mode. The built-in variable-pitch-mode renders all buffer text in a proportional font ¹, but we need a more granular solution given org-mode buffers can have embedded source code blocks and header bullets.

Somewhat related: I find visual-line-mode to work well with variable width fonts as opposed to auto-fill-mode, which results in ragged margins, line twiddling, and screen width affecting wrapping ².

To put it all together here’s an example use-package config setting the modes and fonts for org-mode:

(use-package org
  :hook ((org-mode . org-indent-mode)
         (org-mode . visual-line-mode)
         (org-mode . variable-pitch-mode))
  :config
  (set-face-attribute 'org-block nil :inherit 'fixed-pitch)
  (set-face-attribute 'org-table nil :inherit 'fixed-pitch)
  (set-face-attribute 'org-code nil :inherit 'fixed-pitch)
  (set-face-attribute 'org-indent nil :inherit '(org-hide fixed-pitch)))

Other Resources

After writing this post I came across a few other resources:

• Diego Zamboni’s post on beautifying org-mode
• the minad/org-modern package which handles extensive Emacs styling