On Sat, Oct 21, 2023 at 7:07 AM Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > Probably not with this specific one, but other customizations of
> > default-frame-alist could potentially have undesirable effects.
>
> If we want to add this to the FAQ, perhaps we could add a disclaimer [...]
>

I don't have strong opinions about how frequently this (sort of) question
comes up, but I can add a couple data points:

First, I've been doing this sort of frame configuration in early-init.el
basically since it was added to master.

The general class of things that can cause problems, from my memory, is
things where the setting depends on some gui-specific stuff that is not yet
initialized during early-init. For example, conditioning on window-system
is questionable. Another "common" problem I've seen is setting fonts in
initial/default-frame-alist without checking to ensure that Emacs can find
the named font. In fact, since the arrival of early-init.el, I have, at
various times, conditioned the setting based on finding the font in
font-family-alist, and/or moved the setting to
server-after-make-frame-hook. These days I just set it unconditionally and
live with the (very rare) trouble when setting up on a new system, but I
wouldn't suggest that in a FAQ or piece of beginner advice.

If we want to try to gather some other settings that might apply to this
case, I'll mention that setting menu-bar-lines, tool-bar-lines,
vertical-scroll-bars, and scroll-bar-width in early-init.el have all helped
avoid redraw/flicker on various systems in the past. Memory suggests that
setting frame-inhibit-implied-resize in early-init.el can have an impact
here, but those memories are partially based on a variety of older gui
systems, and might be less impactful today.

As usual, I hope this helps,
~Chad