Re: unpleasant flickering in terminal emacs

[Emanuel Berg <moasen@zoho.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Then I take it as meaning that "emacs -Q"
> doesn't show the problem, even if you load
> the theme you are normally using? If so,
> I suggest to bisect your customizations to
> find out which one(s) cause this flickering,
> then come back here and tell what you found.

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?

I guess this is an inherent problem with all
software that is based on customization and
extension, and where that happens in text files
that contain code. (Now it sounds like I have
tons of such software. And maybe I do...)

In practice, I have not experienced this as
a problem. I can find the bug in all my init
files because they are loaded by theme. So to
do binary search does not mean commenting out
half the code in a single enormous file (that
itself contains comments/"sections as
comments").

But that's the mere technical side to searching
of course. With time, one gets better at
finding the problem by thinking at the same
time as one does a brute-force attempt.
That's why the fighters that can punch AND
think are the best. Or carpenters for
that matter!

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!

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?

Then one could say, OK, so Gnus works. But not
my Gnus!

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573