poet

A light emacs theme that's well suited for prose: particularly org-mode and markdown-mode; or any mode that works well with variable-pitch mode.

Motivation

The main idea behind this was to make Emacs more friendly for writing prose instead of code. Highlights include mixing monospace and variable pitch text in markdown and org-modes, making it convenient to write prose and code together. I wrote a about building poet at https://explog.in/notes/poet.html. For example,

Set up

Installation:
- Melpa: Make sure melpa is in your package archives list, and M-x package-install poet-theme
- Manual: Download the theme to your custom-theme-directory which defaults to ~/emacs.d.
Variable-pitch-mode: Adding variable pitch mode to text modes will help in rendering mixed fonts every time you edit markdown, org-mode, etc.

    (add-hook 'text-mode-hook
               (lambda ()
                (variable-pitch-mode 1)))

Custom fonts: Choose your fonts/font sizes before loading the theme with

    (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family "Iosevka" :height 130)
    (set-face-attribute 'fixed-pitch nil :family "Iosevka")
    (set-face-attribute 'variable-pitch nil :family "Baskerville")

Mac OSX Title Bar: Only for Emacs 26.1

    (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-transparent-titlebar . t))
    (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(ns-appearance . light))

Additional useful modes: Some modes I like to enable/disable

    (olivetti-mode 1)        ;; Centers text in the buffer
    (flyspell-mode 1)        ;; Catch Spelling mistakes
    (typo-mode 1)            ;; Good for symbols like em-dash

    (blink-cursor-mode 0)    ;; Reduce visual noise
    (linum-mode 0)           ;; No line numbers for prose

    (setq org-bullets-bullet-list
        '("◉" "○"))
    (org-bullets 1)