Question

I run an email client in a separate emacs window (usually connecting to gnuserv), for example,

emacs -f wl

(the email client being Wanderlust, which probably doesn’t matter much).

Is it possible to make emacs remember my preferred

• window layout,
• main window dimensions,
• fonts, colours, etc.,

to set these up only when wl is called? Roughly speaking, if I want to have black background in the email client but white otherwise?

I’m especially interested in keeping the window layout because the default one has to be manually adjusted every time wl is loaded.

Answer 1

There is default-frame-alist variable that allows you to specify the default appearance and behavior for a new frame (frame is what you call a seperate Emacs window). Though it overrides the settings for all frame, you can advise your function to mask its global value and set it yours. Something like this:

(defadvice wl (around wl-frame-settings activate)
  (let ((default-frame-alist (append
                              '((width . 82) (height . 36)
                                (cursor-color . "#ffa200")
                                (tool-bar-lines . 0)
                                ;; ...
                                )
                              default-frame-alist)))
    ad-do-it))

As TJ pointed out, this solution might have a drawback that it gets invoked too late. TJ’s wlwrapper may be a better way.