I get the impression that &quot;it looks good&quot; has only fairly recently become an important design consideration for hackers. The problem is not specific to Emacs, quite a bit of Linux FOSS has a pretty ugly GUI. It&#x27;s starting to get better, but fixing early design choices can be a lot of work. I guess nobody has bothered putting that much work into the Emacs GUI yet...<p>Until then: use Emacs in terminal. That&#x27;s the way it was meant to be used originally, and it still looks best that way ;-)