fixing greek characters display

I generally like the Monaco font, that I use for both Emacs and my rxvt-unicode terminals in GNU/Linux. In order to achieve this, I had the following in my ~/.Xdefaults:

emacs*font: Monaco:pixelsize=13

urxvt*font: xft:Monaco:pixelsize=13

Although it works perfectly fine for “normal text”, it does a disastrous job for fancier characters such as greek symbols. I don’t know much about fonts lookup, but I guess there’s a fallback mechanism to elect another font when the selected one does not contain the required symbols.

Anyway, as you can see in the following capture of my rxvt-unicode setup, it’s not exactly pretty (bottom left for the display before fixing). It gets much better after modifying my ~/.Xdefaults to contain:

urxvt*font: xft:Monaco:pixelsize=13,xft:Monospace

Similarly for Emacs, the default display was not great (although at least readable). Putting something like the following in my ~/.emacs solved the issue for me.

(set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'greek '("dejavu sans mono". "unicode-bmp"))

And now my Lisp lambdas can finally look good :)