Dear Drew,

On 19.05.2010, at 17:07, Drew Adams wrote:

>> we need to have an internal rollout of Emacs where we want to 
>> put some institute-specific defaults in a site-start.el (or 
>> default.el) file. I can see why one generally should not set 
>> "inhibit-startup-screen" as a default for new users, in our 
>> case (we try to provide internal documentation and courses) 
>> it seems justified. If we put
>> 
>> (setq inhibit-startup-screen t)
>> 
>> in site-start.el we still get the Emacs splashscreen. Is 
>> there a way to avoid the splashscreen other than using 
>> user-specific .emacs files?
> 
> I would think, following the doc, that (setq inhibit-startup-screen t) would
> work. You might want to check whether the value is actually t after Emacs starts
> up. If it is not, figure out where it gets changed.
> 
> Other than that, take a look also at option `initial-buffer-choice'.

The latter solves the problem partially:

(find-file "~/untitled")
(setq initial-buffer-choice "~/untitled")

will indeed display an "untitled" buffer (no more splash screen), however, dropping a file on the Emacs icon no longer opens that file but also displays the "untitled" buffer (to be fair: I never mentioned that this drag & drop feature was desirable in our case).

Without "initial-buffer-choice" drag & drop works as expected - but yields a split screen with the splash screen in the lower part (and a full splash screen if the Emacs icon is just clicked).

So it seems that there is no easy way to configure Emacs 23.2 to not display the splash screen (split or full screen), apart from using a "--no-splash" start option or a user specific .emacs file where inhibit-startup-screen does work (if one still wants to have drag & drop support for the Emacs icon). This is not a big deal for individual users, but still a bit awkward if you want to have a ready-to-run-distribution for a specific purpose.

It seems to me that it would be a good thing if inhibit-startup-screen would also work in a site-start.el-file.

Thanks for all the other answers, too!

Warm regards,
 Stefan
-- 
Dr. Stefan Vollmar, Dipl.-Phys.
Head of IT group
Max-Planck-Institut für neurologische Forschung
Gleuelerstr. 50, 50931 Köln, Germany
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Email: vollmar@nf.mpg.de   http://www.nf.mpg.de