Emacs font settings not working in new frame

I'm trying to get comfortable with emacs. I installed emacs starter kit. Now I'm trying to customize fonts. In ~/.emacs.d/init.el I did (set-frame-font "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1"). It is working fine untill I do C-x 5 2. The new frame gets created with fonts, that were on the system before my customization. How do I override this behaviour to use only fonts I specify in init.el? Should I, probably, create ~/.emacs file for such settings (it's missing now)?

Solution 1:

set-frame-font sets the font of the current frame. To set the default font for all frames, include the following line in your ~/.emacs.d/init.el, set the font parameter in default-frame-alist:

(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
             '(font . "-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1"))

~/.emacs is the traditional location for Emacs's configuration file. ~/.emacs.d/init.el is an alternate name with exactly the same role. Use either (but not both).

For X displays (i.e. on unix, or on non-unix systems using an X server), you can also set the font through X resources. On many systems, ~/.Xresources is read when you log in, and you can write there:

Emacs.font: -adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-m-70-iso8859-1

Solution 2:

set-frame-font takes two optional arguments: KEEP-SIZE and FRAMES. If FRAMES is set to a non-nil value then the font is applied to future frames.

(set-frame-font "Inconsolata-13" t t)

I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but it's true as of Emacs 24.4.1.