Suddenly, grep, list-buffers etc. split the screen horizontally... but .emacs is unchanged!

Suddenly, grep, list-buffers etc. split the screen horizontally... but .emacs is unchanged!

[Tom Ritchford]

Suddenly, in the middle of a long emacs session (it had been up for
over a week) my terminal-based emacs -nw now splits horizontally for
every new window (grep, compilation, list-buffers, etc).  I've used
emacs for over 25 years and never gotten into this state.

I restarted emacs - no luck.

My .emacs hadn't changed in a while.  Just to be sure, I reverted to a
backup .emacs from February, when I'm sure this problem didn't occur -
nope!

I don't tend to make huge changes to my system.  The one thing that
happened that I have to believe is related is that I loaded and ran
the OS/X emacs (with "real" windows and menus), which I decided not to
use because of the anti-aliased text.

Strangely enough, that instance of emacs splits vertically (like every
other instance of emacs I've ever used) - but I find it hard to read.

I'm very frustrated!  I use emacs for about 50 hours a week and now my
main emacs "isn't working" (EVERY time the screen splits vertically I
get diverted from my work - and that happens many dozens of times an
hour).  I really don't want to be forced to use the damned windowed
emacs, I *like* the text terminal based emacs and have used it for
over a decade.  I've been a good boy, I have complete backups of
everything, I don't change my system and yet it's now broken.

So any help is MOST appreciated!


System Details:

Mac OS/X, 10.6.2, details on request.

Terminal emacs version:
  GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.7.0, X toolkit) of 2009-08-15
on hofmann

OS/X "native" emacs version:
  GNU Emacs 23.1.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.8.0, NS apple-appkit-949.54) of
2009-08-16 on black.local

Re: Suddenly, grep, list-buffers etc. split the screen horizontally... but .emacs is unchanged!

[Joost Kremers]

Tom Ritchford wrote:
> Suddenly, in the middle of a long emacs session (it had been up for
> over a week) my terminal-based emacs -nw now splits horizontally for
> every new window (grep, compilation, list-buffers, etc).  I've used
> emacs for over 25 years and never gotten into this state.

What's the size of the terminal Emacs is running in? Did you change it?
display-buffer (the function usually responsible for splitting buffers to show
output etc.) may split the window horizontally or vertically, depending on the
size of the window. See the documentation for split-window-sensibly for details.


-- 
Joost Kremers                                      joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

Re: Suddenly, grep, list-buffers etc. split the screen horizontally... but .emacs is unchanged!

[Tom Ritchford]

On Mar 20, 1:15 pm, Joost Kremers <joostkrem...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Tom Ritchford wrote:
> > Suddenly, in the middle of a long emacs session (it had been up for
> > over a week) my terminal-based emacs -nw now splits horizontally for
> > every new window (grep, compilation, list-buffers, etc).  I've used
> > emacs for over 25 years and never gotten into this state.
>
> What's the size of the terminal Emacs is running in? Did you change it?
> display-buffer (the function usually responsible for splitting buffers to show
> output etc.) may split the window horizontally or vertically, depending on the
> size of the window. See the documentation for split-window-sensibly for details.

Thanks for the pointer to "split-window-sensibly" - very interesting.

I wish I could tell you that fixed it - but the good news is that it,
somehow, fixed itself - and I didn't even restart the emacs (running
in the terminal).

And now I can't reproduce it.  I tried restarting the character-only
emacs.  I tried running it with and without the Windowing emacs
running.  I looked at the timestamps of every file in my directory -
none of them has changed.   I tried running it in tall thin terminal
windows and short, squat ones!

As I (claimed) before, I try to be really systematic, have a local git
instance for all development as well as Apple's own Time Machine, so
I'm at a loss as to how it happened - and how it reverted.

(But I wrote this up in case someone else runs into it...)

Thanks for the tip, I now know something new...