I figure I would share this one more time. The thing is so handy I put it on my desktop but the original is blinding white and 1.5:1 aspect ratio. This is a quick recolor and resize to 16:9. There is a 90px margin on top that is sized for the GNOME header so that the content remains visible. Sorry if this post seems redundant. For me, having this reminder to keep trying to use Emacs is just the motivation I need to open a file in Emacs instead of just using gedit quickly.

bonus tip!

On Fedora 40, if you have darkmode set to the default in GNOME, GNU Emacs does not follow the darkmode styling directive for the menu bar. I spent forever trying to make this work in darkmode. If the app is launched using $ GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark emacs it will start with the menu bar set to dark mode.

However there is a script that actually launches Emacs in /user/bin/emacs-desktop. If you open that file and modify it by adding export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark emacs just before the last line, it will launch with darkmode enabled. This is the entire contents of that file:

#!/usr/bin/sh

# The pure GTK build of emacs is not supported on X11, so try to avoid
# using if there is an alternative.

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = 'x11' ]; then
    case "$(readlink -f /usr/bin/emacs)" in
    */emacs-*.*-pgtk)
        if type emacs-gtk+x11 >/dev/null; then
            exec emacs-gtk+x11 "$@"
        elif type emacs-lucid >/dev/null; then
            exec emacs-lucid "$@"
        fi
        ;;
    esac
fi

export GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark emacs
exec emacs "$@"

I’m not claiming it is the right way. It just worked when I tried it.

  • heikkiket
    1·
    3 months ago

    Using Emacs may have a slow start but in few years it will subsume you so that you do more and more things in Emacs. Beware!

    I fire up Gedit from time to time as well. It’s a great small editor.

    BTW if someone knows a moderator from this community, I’d like to get my join request accepted so that I can post something here.