Re: Incorrect Emacs UI on foreign distro (Ubuntu)

[Niall Dooley]

I too experience a similar behaviour on my foreign distro (Trisquel 7 which
though is downstream of Ubuntu so in this respects equivalent) although my DE
of choice is Xfce. I too would like to understand why this occurs.

I tend to disable the menu bar, toolbar and scroll bar so it's not such a big
concern for me. However, on start up I would still get a split second flash of
these UI and see the behaviour you report. To get around this flash I disable
these same UI in a .Xresources file and so no longer have to see this issue.
Niall


On 10 May 2017 at 08:16, Chris Marusich <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've installed Emacs using Guix on a foreign distro (Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS,
> to be precise).  When I start it from GNOME terminal via the following
> command:
>
>   emacs
>
> it looks weird (see attached file "emacs-incorrect-ui.png") and lots of
> warnings are printed to STDERR (see attached file
> "emacs-incorrect-ui.log").  Please note that the output of "which emacs"
> is:
>
>   /home/marusich/.guix-profile/bin/emacs
>
> which demonstrates that I am invoking the emacs installed via Guix.
>
> However, when I start Emacs via the following command:
>
>   env -u XDG_DATA_DIRS emacs
>
> it looks correct (see attached file "emacs-correct-ui.png") and fewer
> warnings are printed to STDERR (see attached file
> "emacs-correct-ui.log").
>
> The contents of XDG_DATA_DIRS are as follows:
>
>   
> XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/ubuntu:/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/var/lib/snapd/desktop
>
> By process of elimination, I have determined that the presence of the
> "/usr/share/" directory is the cause of this issue.  What I mean is that
> when I invoke:
>
>   env 
> XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/ubuntu:/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/var/lib/snapd/desktop
>  emacs
>
> the UI looks the same (and the warnings are the same) as when I invoke:
>
>   env -u XDG_DATA_DIRS emacs
>
> What's going on here?  How can I resolve it?  I know that the
> Guix-installed emacs is actually a wrapper which adds some values to the
> environment variables, but I don't really understand why all these
> warnings are being emitted, or why the UI looks weird.  I can work
> around the issue by using a custom alias (to launch emacs with the right
> combination of environment variables set), or by crafting a similarly
> customized .desktop file, but it'd be great if Emacs's UI didn't look
> weird by default on a foreign distro.
>
> Oh, one last note: I tried installing pretty much every kind of GNOME-
> or GTK-related theme I could find in Guix, but it didn't seem to help.
> I also tried setting various environment variables like XDG_DATA_DIRS
> and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to point at (what I believe to be) the right places
> in my profile (after installing the themes), but that didn't seem to
> help, either.  The only way I was able to get rid of most of the
> warnings was to start emacs as mentioned above.  If I'm just missing
> some theme, please let me know what to install!
>
> --
> Chris