Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abstractbill | Hacker News Reader

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Lots of people -- I'm one of them -- find that switching whole windows seems to pop the mental stack.

That's really interesting! I have the opposite problem - switching windows doesn't pop my mental stack, but if there's anything on the screen other than what I'm trying to focus on, it keeps diverting my attention and ruining my concentration. Fullscreen emacs on OSX (without even the system menu bar!) is just awesome for me.

Here's a screenshot of what my entire desktop looks like when I'm working on code: http://abstractnonsense.com/desktop-2013-02-17.png

You may find this little app useful http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/

Thanks, that does look quite awesome!

How do you get true fullscreen mode in Emacs on OS X?

With Emacs 24 you can use ns-toggle-fullscreen.

Emacs 24.2.1 here, no matches for "ns-toggle fullscreen".

Edit: no luck with the latest pretest (24.2.93.1) either.

for `M-x ns-toggle-fullscreen` you need `brew install emacs --cocoa`

I have (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 'fullboth) in my .emacs, and it just works (GNU Emacs 24.2.91.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36)).

If using macports then install using

    port install emacs-app +fullscreen

Then ns-toggle-fullscreen as mentioned below.

In addition to the mac-specific ways, if you set your Terminal app to Fullscreen (the double diagonal arrows on the top right of Lion+), you can just invoke emacs from the command line. I did this while evaluating whether emacs+evil was something I'd be interested in and it worked just fine.

To be honest, I spend most of my time using OSX in a single fullscreen Terminal.app inside tmux.

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