Now clickong on my Emacs icon on the desktop will open a new gnome-terminal that runs an Emacs inside screen -- it looks pretty much the same as it did before, but I can access and take over my current session remotely from home. As a matter of fact, the shortcut will actually first check if there's a detached screen session that runs emacs and ask me in a small dialog window if I want to re-attach to that session or start a new window.
Makes me happy.
Sorry if that post is of no interest at all to anyone else on HN but me...
;; Launch emacs
(defcommand emacs () ()
(run-or-raise
"urxvt -title emacs -e screen -U -dRR -S emacs -c ~/.screenrc.emacs"
'(:title "emacs" :instance "urxvt" :class "URxvt")))
Some of the thing you might want to consider when doing "emacs -nw"
- Make sure your TERM is exported appropriatly.
Otherwise you may end up with less colors (M-x list-colors-display).
Screen fiddles with TERM and emacs may end up supporting less colors.
- Copy/Paste between regular X apps and the emacs will not work.
You would need to use something like "xsel". See here [1]
- Some of the keys may not work as expected. This will be
apparent especially when using orgmode. You may want to
remap them appropriately
[1] http://hugoheden.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/copypaste-with-ema...
gnome-terminal -x /bin/bash -c /usr/bin/screen
gnome-terminal -x /usr/bin/screen
Copy/Paste works fine for me in so far as that is one of the few things I use the mouse for. (I guess, in a lot of case you use the mouse anyway to select the text you'd like to copy.)
Remapping some keys is indeed necessary. In particular, GNU screen's standard escape key sequence is C-a, which in Emacs a lot of people probably prefer to be bound to (move-beginning-of-line). But also within Emacs some keys may need to be bound using input-decode-map.
As for your launcher, one thing I did differently is that my start script does not automatically re-attach to a detached screen session, but will show me a dialog window where I can select the one thing or the other. The reason for this is that I often keep a few Emacsen running in parallel for a long time, each of which is dedicated to a different aspect of my work. If I detach one session it is not always the case that I want to continue there the next time I open a new Emacs. Also, if more than one Emacs is detached I'd like to be able to say which one I want to re-attach to.
I looked at wanderlust a few years ago when I was looking for an IMAP-compatible email client for Emacs but in the end I wasn't convinced by it. Can't remember, though, what I didn't like about it, perhaps I should give it another chance.
Example: the software supplied by Apple with a Mac does not have any themes except for the choice between Blue (colorful) and Graphite (subdued) in the Appearance system preference pane.
OTOH, I regularly have to wait for the software supplied by Apple and I almost never wait for Emacs.
Both of which I find strikingly unattractive. Overall, I find the OSX UI annoying to use, and the relatively lack of choices in things doesn't help.
I like the idea of a useful out-of-the-box set of defaults, but that should prevent offering users options to tweak to their hearts' content.
Would be nice people could use that tool to create themes for emacs 24, and send them to emacs-devel.