emacs22-gtk and emacs22-x do not display menus

[Ryan T. Sammartino]

Neither emacs22-gtk nor emacs22-x display a menu like they did before upgrading from feisty to gutsy.

emacs22-x displays a menu briefly, but it quickly disappears.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

err, I'm a bit confused here, because I don't have any problems with a menu.

Can you please attach a (perhaps commented) screenshot of the problem?

[Ryan T. Sammartino (ryan-sammartino)]

In the screenshot you see there is no menu ("File", "Edit", etc...) nor menu bar (icons that represent "open file", "save file", etc).

The menu does appear very briefly while Emacs is "booting up".

[Ryan T. Sammartino (ryan-sammartino)]

It seems somewhere something in /etc/emacs/site-start.d/ is now hiding the menu bar, scroll bar and tool bar.

I had to set these variables in my .emacs to get these things back.

'(menu-bar-mode t)
'(scroll-bar-mode (quote left))
'(speedbar-frame-parameters (quote ((minibuffer) (width . 20) (border-width . 0) (menu-bar-lines . 0) (tool-bar-lines . 0) (unsplittable . t) (set-background-color "black"))))
'(tool-bar-mode t))

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

can you please find out (e.g. with grep) what in /etc/emacs/site-start.d/ is providing these bad defaults?

With that information we can move this bug to the correct package.

[Ryan T. Sammartino (ryan-sammartino)]

Yeah... been looking, but it doesn't seem to be doing bad things in any obvious way.

I'll keep digging.

[Ryan T. Sammartino (ryan-sammartino)]

It's the emacs-extra package:

$ grep -C 3 bar-mode /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacs-extra/emacs-extra.el
(defun down-a-lot () (interactive) (scroll-down))
(global-set-key [C-mouse-4] 'down-a-lot)
(global-set-key [C-mouse-5] 'up-a-lot)
(menu-bar-mode nil)
(set-scroll-bar-mode nil)
(when (>= emacs-major-version 21)
  (tool-bar-mode -1)
  (blink-cursor-mode nil)
  (require 'zone)
  (setq zone-idle 300)

This toggles the menu bar and the scroll bar, and turns off the tool bar when emacs-major-version is greater than 21.

It also turns on zone, which was another nasty surprise after the upgrade (when zone kicks in, my laptop heats up to about 7000C).

Attached is a proposed patch.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

after reading the emacs-extra source code, I come to the conclusion that this is an absolutely correct behavior. The purpose of emacs-extra seems to provide some assistance for configuring emacs by using debconf. Try 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow emacs-extra' to get questions presented which seems to provide questions for that.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

tbh, emacs-extra doesn't seem to be a very quality package, and I'd even suggest it to be merged into other already existing packages, so that it can be safely removed from the archive.