Question

I want to set the window size (maybe it is the frame in emacs speaking). I use this for the config. It works, but something happened that confused me. for example, if I set the width 80 and the height 30. When I start the emacs. It initialize to wider than 80 and higher than 30 which I set previously, then in a flash, it shrinked to the width 80 and height 30.

What I want to ask is why it appeared like this? can I set the window size as soon as the emacs initialized? How?

a similar thing happened with the toolbar. I disable the toolbar like this
(tool-bar-mode 0)

when I initialize the emacs, the toolbar appears, but in a flash it disappeared. FYI, I put the (tool-bar-mode 0) in the very first line of the .emacs file.

Answer 1

For the strangely resizing window:

Basically, Emacs brings up its window (frame) before it reads your .emacs. Obviously it has to be some size. Of course, this is customizable. On Unix systems, you do this by setting an X resource, which works a bit like an environment variable: Emacs can check for the setting when it first runs before loading up all the elisp-parsing machinery and getting to work on your .emacs. On Windows, I think you can set these variables through the registry. See this EmacsWiki page for a description of how to set variables in the registry. You want the Emacs.Geometry key.

I don’t know if it’s possible to change tool-bar-mode as an X resource. I didn’t bother, since the appearing and disappearing tool bar was much less irritating than a moving window!