Dired-sidebar Custom font problem.

[Blade6570]

Even if I have (customize-set-variable 'dired-sidebar-use-custom-font t) in my init file, sidebar fails to inherit my font. I found out that removing (buffer-face-mode-invoke 'variable-pitch t) in the dired-sidebar-set-font function fixes the font issue.

The variable-pitch face can be customized too and if it is not then may be sidebar fails to inherit the custom fonts. Maybe you have more insights on this.

[chainedghost]

Looking at dired-sidebar-face in 'Customize' says it's not customizable. Maybe something broke in 29.1?

[ra4ul]

I'm guessing this is the same issue, but dired-sidebar-face no longer honors the :background property I had set to use a different color. I see that it was switched from a variable to a face sometime last year, but neither setting works. I'm still using Emacs 28.2.

[chainedghost]

I am currently using this until someone figures this out:

  (when (member "Noto Sans" (font-family-list))
    (defun my-set-dired-font-family ()
      (face-remap-add-relative 'default :family "Noto Sans"))
    (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 'my-set-dired-font-family))

[frou]

@jojojames Is this a bug or just a configuration issue? It seems like the user's choice of font for the sidebar either doesn't get applied at all, or does but gets clobbered immediately.

[mcraveiro]

Hi, thanks very much for dired sidebar. I am experimenting with replacing treemacs with it (due to some issues on windows) and so far, so amazing. I have one question, which is related to this ticket I believe. I'd like to also customise my font, as the OP; but in my case, I just want to make the font size a couple of points smaller than the current size. Can someone provide an example of how to use dired-sidebar-face please? I tried following on from @chainedghost above, e.g.:

  (when (member "Noto Sans" (font-family-list))
    (defun my-set-dired-font-family ()
      (face-remap-add-relative 'default :family "Noto Sans"))
    (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 'my-set-dired-font-family))

but could not quite understand how this applies to changing the font in dired-sidebar I'm afraid. Many thanks for your time.

[mcraveiro]

Actually, whilst checking your docs, I bumped into ibuffer-sidebar [1], which has a similar approach:

(use-package ibuffer-sidebar
  :load-path "~/.emacs.d/fork/ibuffer-sidebar"
  :ensure nil
  :commands (ibuffer-sidebar-toggle-sidebar)
  :config
  (setq ibuffer-sidebar-use-custom-font t)
  (setq ibuffer-sidebar-face `(:family "Helvetica" :height 140)))

I think I just need to play around with dired-sidebar-face in a similar fashion. Cheers

[1] https://github.com/jojojames/ibuffer-sidebar?tab=readme-ov-file

[mcraveiro]

Right, I think I just about got to the point of the original poster, and all my woes are indeed related to variable-pitch. The implementation of ibuffer-sidebar says:

(defun ibuffer-sidebar-set-font ()
  "Customize font in `ibuffer-sidebar'.

Set font to a variable width (proportional) in the current buffer."
  (interactive)
  (setq-local buffer-face-mode-face ibuffer-sidebar-face)
  (buffer-face-mode))

With this I can set the height with no problems. But the implementation of dired-sidebar says:

(defun dired-sidebar-set-font ()
  "Customize font in `dired-sidebar'.

Set font to a variable width (proportional) in the current buffer."
  (interactive)
  (require 'face-remap)
  (setq-local buffer-face-mode-face 'dired-sidebar-face)
  (buffer-face-mode-invoke 'variable-pitch t))

With this I cannot change the font size. However, when I do:

(defun dired-sidebar-set-font ()
  "Customize font in `dired-sidebar'.

Set font to a variable width (proportional) in the current buffer."
  (interactive)
  (require 'face-remap)
  (setq-local buffer-face-mode-face 'dired-sidebar-face)
  ;; (buffer-face-mode-invoke 'variable-pitch t)
  (buffer-face-mode)
  )

And then a couple of evals:

(setq dired-sidebar-face `(:height 70 :family "Source Code Pro"))
(dired-sidebar-set-font)

This produces the desired result:

Now, I must prefix all of this by saying I have no great knowledge of emacs lisp, so this hackery may all be very dodgy :-) but at least it works for me. Can you explain why dired-sidebar works differently from ibuffer-sidebar on this regard? Tia

[jojojames]

Not sure why the implementations are different, it's been a few years since I wrote both but the ibuffer implementation should be newer. I copied it to dired-sidebar. https://github.com/jojojames/dired-sidebar/commit/573658021fd6e6cf032d789de29aca4e5dd258fd