Re: Migrating font faces from xemacs to emacs

On 27/03/2026 15.19, Frank Steiner wrote:
> I hope it's ok to ask here although it's basically a xemacs question.
> We are trying to migrate our users from xemacs to emacs (on SuSE Linux),
> and besides some other things, the font faces are very very different.
> I wonder if it is possible to get the lisp code for the default font
> faces of xemacs so that we could add them to .emacs.d for users who
> want to keep the old ones. I can list the faces with "list-faces-display"
> in xemacs which will show Face/Foreground/Background/Fontspec for all
> the faces.

I think what you may be looking for is sort of a decompiler that 
converts XEmacs internal font structures back into higher level Lisp 
code. AFAIK, there is no functionality for achieving that built into 
XEmacs, and it may be quite an effort to implement (possibly using the 
generic “Specifier” API described in Info). So Eli's and Stefan's 
suggestion regarding parsing the source code might be your best option 
after all. However, that probably comes with its own little issues (e.g. 
multi-line declarations).

Looking at it from a different angle, having jumped ship relatively 
recently (about seven years ago) after some 25 years of using XEmacs 
exclusively, different face definitions were among the least of my 
worries. Have users expressed an actual concern after seeing the 
differences? I suspect that after discovery of Emacs' theming support 
this will fade rather quickly and be replaced by curiosity.

The nostalgia section in my init.el contains a handful of keybindings 
that I still prefer over Emacs defaults, and a function that changes the 
cursor shape at the end of a line, so I can spot trailing whitespace 
easily without much visual distraction (i.e. whitespace-mode, which I do 
use, too, in specific scenarios). No face definitions.