Re: unpleasant flickering in terminal emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>
> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2018 22:38:25 +0200
> 
> Is there an Emacs FAQ? (Of course there is.
> Somewhere in Emacs!) The first question should
> be,
> 
>    Q: I have a problem when I [insert the rest
>       of your question here]
>       
>    A: run Emacs like this
> 
>         $ emacs -Q
> 
>       does the problem remain?

People who discover something important frequently want that to be the
first issue described in <THE DOCUMENT OF YOUR CHOICE>.  Of course,
there's only one such issue that can ever be the first one in any
document...

Emacs does have a FAQ (two of them, actually), but our documentation
principles are that such fundamental issues should be in the manual,
not in the FAQ.

The Emacs manual has a chapter on reporting bugs, which begins with
explaining how to establish there's a bug and how to search the list
of known problems.  Then it describes how to report a bug, and as part
of that tells about "emacs -Q".

> The only exception to the rule "isolating the
> problem isn't difficult" that I have
> encountered is with Gnus. Because leave out the
> configuration, and you can't get to your
> e-mail, or to any newsgroups, so you can't
> reproduce the error w/o the Gnus your
> init files!

The "start with 'emacs -Q'" rule doesn't mean you cannot load
additional packages, set variables to non-default values, etc.  The
idea is to present a full recipe starting from 'emacs -Q', so that
others could reproduce that without knowing anything about the Emacs
setup on the OP's system.

> Perhaps one should do like the LaTeX people
> with their hangup on "minimal working
> examples", namely, write a "minimal Gnus init
> file" that does that and only that, namely
> connects to ONE mailbox, and a single NNTP
> newsgroup, and one Gmane/NNTP ditto, and why
> not the .test ones while at it?

Exactly.  Except that if the problem doesn't need a Gnus init file at
all, you don't even need such a minimal file as part of the recipe.
You can just show which variables should be set to what values,
manually.