[mattmein]

Regarding your long lines issue - from your description it sounds instead like an unicode issue which I also ran into a while back.

What happens is that your main programming font does not have the unicode characters, so Emacs falls back to searching all your fonts for each character it can't find, which is slow if it has to search through many different fonts.

The solution is to ensure you have symbol fonts installed - see the list of fonts here: https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts