emacs launching in GNOME is all messed up

[Jonathan Kamens]

With the most recent Lunar updates, which I believe include both an Emacs update and a GNOME update, I have encountered multiple annoying / bizarre problems with launching Emacs in GNOME. In particular:

1) Sometimes Emacs launches as a tiny window rather than a window of the correct size.
2) Sometimes it gets into a state where when I click on the icon in the dock instead of bringing the open Emacs window to the front it launches a new Emacs every time I click.
3) Sometimes it fails to show up in the dock at all when I launch it.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.04
Package: emacs 1:28.2+1-10ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.1.0-16.16-generic 6.1.6
Uname: Linux 6.1.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.26.0-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Mar 10 16:13:14 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-08-16 (1302 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" - Release amd64 (20190416)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: emacs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to lunar on 2022-11-24 (106 days ago)

[Jonathan Kamens (jik)]

A bit more about this...

There are two Emacs launchers available, "Emacs (GUI)" and "Emacs (Client)". If I pin "Emacs (GUI)" to my favorites and then launch it, I end up with two Emacs icons in my dock, one pinned and one unpinned which is "Emacs (Client)". Every time I click on the "Emacs (GUI)" launcher I get a new window. Clicking on "Emacs (Client)" brings all the windows to the front.

I don't want to pin "Emacs (Client)" to my favorites because if I do that and then try to kill and restart the emacsclient server inside Emacs, it kills the Emacs window. I need to be able to kill and restart the emacsclient server inside Emacs because sometimes I access my computer from the desktop and launch emacs there for editing with emacsclient and other times I access my computer remotely and launch emacs there for editing with emacsclient.

[Jonathan Kamens (jik)]

I marked this as affecting gnome-shell as well as Emacs because the problem of Emacs launching with a tiny window instead of the properly sized window is occurring even when I downgrade to the older Emacs debs, so that's apparently a problem with the new gnome-shell, not with the new Emacs?

[Jonathan Kamens (jik)]

Note: the "Sometimes Emacs launches as a tiny window" issue happens *even when Emacs is explicitly launched with -g 80x35 on the command line*.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Walter Garcia-Fontes (walter-garcia)]

I confirm this issue with the final release of 23.04.

[Gregory Smith (wolfy)]

As a workaround to the pinning issue, commenting out the StartupWMClass line in /usr/share/applications/emacsclient.desktop allows pinning the Emacs (GUI) desktop entry and doesn't add another icon. The two desktop entries share the same StartupWMClass and I don't know how gnome shell would be able to associate the windows to icons correctly in that situation.

[Alan Modra (amodra)]

I see this on both 23.04 and 23.10, around 10% of the time emacs launches from a shell, and with emacs -Q too.