Learning GNU Emacs, Second Edition

X Display Customizations

We’ve already covered ways to make Emacs do intelligent highlighting of buffer text. There are other useful customizations you can set up for your Emacs-under-X environment. If you prefer having an extra line of screen space to having the default menu bar available, you can arrange this by calling

(menu-bar-mode nil)

from your .emacs file. Of course, this maneuver works from the minibuffer as well.

It’s also possible to change Emacs’ behavior so that each new buffer gets its own individual frame. To accomplish this, put the following line in your .emacs file:

(setq pop-up-frames t)

This addition may or may not be a good idea. There are (at least) two basically different styles of using your X desktop space. In the first style, users keep a few large windows open constantly at fairly fixed positions; one window might be an editor, another a clock, and so forth. People who set their desktops up this way tend to like having an uncluttered desk. If you count yourself among this group, the effect of setting this variable will probably not please you. In the second style, users seem to thrive on clutter or elaborate piles of paper (or screen analogues of paper). If you’re this kind of user, pop-up-frames is for you.

The call

(transient-mark-mode t)

changes Emacs’ selection-highlighting behavior so that the gray background highlight is always on in the region between point and mark. In this mode, a buffer’s mark is unset whenever the buffer is modified; this operation ...