Re: How to get rid of *GNU Emacs* buffer on start-up?

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

William Case <billlinux@rogers.com> writes:

> Hi David;
>
> On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 22:28 -0700, Davin Pearson wrote:
>> Every time I start Emacs I have to bury to *GNU Emacs" buffer.  This
>> is a little bit annoying having to do this.  If I can't kill this
>> buffer, then I would at least prefer the default-directory of that
>> buffer to be "~/" so that I can easily load a file that I want to
>> edit.  The following code is what I have written to accomplish that
>> task but sadly it doesn't appear to work.
>
> This may be too late to be of much help, but ...
>
> a command line in a terminal or launcher of "emacs --no-splash /" gets
> me what you appear to want.  Change the "/" to the directory path you
> would like e.g. "~/" or "/home/user/to/where/ever".  It works for me.
>
> I haven't tried it but I would think "/home/user/new" could be used to
> open a new buffer each time as long as you remember to 'save as'
> myfilename.
>

I was trying very hard to avoid getting dragged into yet another thread
which has been pointlessley hijacked by Xah so that he can grind his own
personal axe. However, it seems nobody has decided to point out that the
sort of things the OP and others have asked for are in fact now part of
CVS emacs and have been for some time now. From the Emacs 23 News file

,----
| ** The option `inhibit-startup-screen' (with aliases to old names
| `inhibit-splash-screen' and `inhibit-startup-message') doesn't inhibit
| display of the initial message in the *scratch* buffer.  If you don't
| want to display the initial message in the *scratch* buffer at startup,
| you can set the option `initial-scratch-message' to nil.
| 
| ** New user option `initial-buffer-choice' specifies what to display
| after starting Emacs: startup screen, *scratch* buffer, visiting a
| file or directory.
`----

So if the OP is not satisfied with any of the (relevant) suggestions
already made, they can either wait for emacs 23 (could be a while before
it is released) or start running the CVS version, which I've found to be
very stable and usable, but not garanteed to be without bugs. How
difficult it is to run from CVS depends a bit on the platform. I know
there are 'snapshots' for Debian, Ubuntu and I believe windows. I
personally prefer building directly from CVS myself, which is very easy
under Debian as long as you make some very minor modifications (so that
you can take advantage of debian elisp packages) and are prepared to
also have the emacs-snapshot installed (i have some fairly specialised
requirements that for some reason don't work with the packaged snapshot,
but work fine with my CVS build.) You don't ahve to keep the snapshot
installed, but if you do, it means you dn't have problems installing
other elisp packages and you have sources that are built with emacs
23. There are some diffeences in the coding systems of compiled files
under emacs 23 and earlier verisons. While emacs 23 will still work with
them, it has to do some conversions when loading the elc files, which
can slow things down. Having the emacs-snapshot installed is a simple
way to ensure you have elc files built with 23 that are also managed by
apt, so you get the best of both worlds.

HTH

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au