Windowed emacs in X11

Question

Windowed emacs in X11

Dear Apple Discussions,

I noticed that the built in emacs does not open up a new window in X11 - instead it runs in the terminal.
However if I start an emacs session on a remote computer X11 will give me a new window.

Any thoughts as to why this is?

Thanks

Posted on Jul 20, 2005 10:02 AM

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Answer 1

Bill Scott

Level 6

11,465 points

Jul 20, 2005 11:22 AM in response to Bertrand Biritz

There is a program called xemacs that starts the emacs gui. Perhaps it is aliased to that on your remote computer?

This would never happen if you used vim.

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Answer 2

Jul 20, 2005 11:40 AM in response to Bill Scott

No, on the remote machine the command emacs is to /usr/local/bin/emacs.

I read the emacs man pages which came with the Tiger and they mention:

Using Emacs with X

Emacs has been tailored to work well with the X window system. If you
run Emacs from under X windows, it will create its own X window to dis-
play in. You will probably want to start the editor as a background
process so that you can continue using your original window.

Also on a regular linux machine when I run emacs a new window appears.

By the way, this also happens with vim when I run it in X11 locally - a new window doesn't pop up, instead it opens inside of the terminal.

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Answer 3

Bill Scott

Level 6

11,465 points

Jul 20, 2005 5:05 PM in response to Bertrand Biritz

You are absolutely correct.

Sorry.

I am baffled too.

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Answer 4

Jul 20, 2005 7:38 PM in response to Bill Scott

emacs itself has been tailored to do x11 stuff, it's true. However, the emacs shipped with OS X appears to have had the x11 stuff disabled. If I read Apple's code right, they set:

Extra ConfigureFlags = --without-x

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Answer 5

Jul 21, 2005 1:37 AM in response to Daniel Macks

Is there a way of turning it back on?

Where is this code located?

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Answer 6

Bill Scott

Level 6

11,465 points

Jul 21, 2005 8:35 AM in response to Bertrand Biritz

I think it is a configure option. You would have to recompile. It might be easier to get this via fink (or some other distribution). Fink offers a variety of emacs options

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Answer 7

Jul 21, 2005 9:27 AM in response to Bill Scott

Thanks for the information.

You wouldn't happen to know why Apple decided to do that?

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Answer 8

Bill Scott

Level 6

11,465 points

Jul 21, 2005 9:31 AM in response to Bertrand Biritz

They don't install X11.app by default (which they should), so they typically lobotomize software that is designed to have an X11 gui.

For example, before an aqua port of tcltk was installed by default, the version of Python that Apple installed lacked the Tkinter gui support.

This is one of the reasons why I like fink. You can install more standard versions of these same packages, and they behave in the expected manner out of the box.

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Answer 9

Jul 21, 2005 9:39 AM in response to Bill Scott

Thanks again for the info. Makes sense (not the part about not installing X11 by default - wait didn't Tiger install it by default, I forgot).

I will be installing the latest version of emacs21 from fink.

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Answer 10

Jul 21, 2005 1:22 PM in response to Bertrand Biritz

"ExtraConfigureFlags = --without-x" is a compile-time option, not a runtime or user configuration-file option. Sorry I wasn't clear.

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Answer 11

Jul 21, 2005 3:19 PM in response to Bertrand Biritz

After installing Fink and having to upgrade my XCode to 2.1 as gcc4 had some severe issues in XCode 2.0 ( http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=41334). It all works the way it is "supposed" to.

Thanks for the help

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Answer 12

Jul 21, 2005 11:24 PM in response to Bertrand Biritz

Last I heard the Fink ratio of things fixed in XCode2.1 vs things it newly breaks is about 1:1. If you are gonna make heavy use of fink on Tiger, best to update your packages often if you use the "unstable" branch while the many messes are being un-messed.

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Answer 13

Jul 22, 2005 11:06 PM in response to Bertrand Biritz

The basic question has been answered, so I'd just like to make a side comment -- back in the early days of OS X I noticed that Apple would sometimes modify a unix-based program but not change the man page to reflect their changes to the program. Looks like that is still the case. Annoying.

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Answer 14

Jul 25, 2005 6:56 AM in response to Bertrand Biritz

You can geta "carbonized" version of Emacs which uses Aqua here - http://home.att.ne.jp/alpha/z123/emacs-mac-e.html

There are also versions for Panther and earlier.

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Answer 15

Jul 26, 2005 2:25 AM in response to Jeremiah Foster

Hello everybody!

I wonder if my problem is related to the discussed matter as well:
Whenever I want to start a windowed application through X11 I can see the new window opening briefly. Afterwards it "windowshades" and I can see only the windowbar. If a login dialog or something similar opens I get a an empty dialog window without any buttons and probably one of two or three entry fields.

Would the suggested Emacs solve this?

Has someone experiences something similar with 10.4.2 and X11 (1.1)???

I have just checked different machines: Another 10.4.2 with X11(1.1) shows the same behaviour. A 10.3.9 machine with X11 (1.0) doesn't show this wrong behaviour.

Thanks for any help here?

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