Emacs opens in terminal window (i3wm)

kiigass · n00b Joined: 21 Nov 2018 Posts: 65

Hi,

I am new to gentoo and to i3wm, but not to emacs. I have installed everything so far and now, whenever I command "emacs" from my cli, it opens emacs in that terminal. But I would prefer emacs to open in a new emacs-window. How do I do that? Is this a problem of my i3wm or rather with my gentoo? Do I need to set a USE-flag?

Any help is appreciated,
thanks
Kiigass

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:05 pm Post subject:

Probably you should activate gtk (this for gtk3) or gtk2 use flag for enable gui emacs
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kiigass · n00b Joined: 21 Nov 2018 Posts: 65

How can I check which use flags are active for my emacs?

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Mon Sep 02, 2019 2:25 pm Post subject:

Michael Allan · n00b Joined: 24 Mar 2017 Posts: 4

Use flag `X` used to add the graphical front end, now it’s `gui`.

app-editors/emacs: Migrate from `X` to `gui` USE flag.
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=d7fbd72efd2cc6096a71ac654e1659f12963dfe3

Moriah · Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 8:34 pm Post subject:

I've run into this problem before, but since I generally don't emerge emacs very often -- like every few years -- I never remember the magic word. ;-)

I'm now trying to build a development environment in an oracle virtualbox vm running a gentoo guest on a windows-10 host. I have fiddled with use flags until I'm blue in the face, but I can't get emacs to run in X mode, only termnal mode.

I had no trouble emerging xemacs and getting it to run in X mode.

Because I do not have the vm honoring the windows clipboard, and I do not yet have a web browser running in the vm, it is difficult to post a cut-and-paste copy of the output from emerge -pv emacs. If I manually invoke 'USE="X gui" emacs' then it works. Why doesn't it honor the same flags in package.use ???
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21633

You may have conflicting flags in package.use that direct it to do otherwise. If emerge --pretend --verbose app-editors/emacs tries to set the flags to disabled, and setting $USE sets them to enabled, then I would inspect grep -r emacs /etc/portage/package.use for relevant per-package overrides. If you don't find any, then your global USE must not be enabling the gui and you should add a line to package.use to enable it.

Alternatively, you could switch to Vim, which has separate packages for console vim (app-editors/vim) and X vim (app-editors/gvim, with a variety of GUI toolkits to pick from).

Moriah · Posted: Sat Jan 09, 2021 11:01 pm Post subject:

This is like a Ford vs Chevy argument, but I'm not interested in using vim. I've been an emacs user since 1986, and to quote an old cigarette ad, "I'd rather fight than switch." ;-)

My package.use file has exactly one line in it, for emacs.

I just built the system yesterday and got it to boot. Now I'm adding the useful tools I need to do software development on it. Emacs comes first, because I hate nano.
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Foghorn Leghorn is a Warner Bros. cartoon character.