You want to have all the convenience of an Xserver without 'bloat' added (let's say Emacs itself isn't bloat, OK?)
The following steps will give you a X session with Emacs running in full-screen without a window manager. Hitting C-x C-c will shut down X and drop you back to login.
1) we don't need a so-called display manager (LightDM, etc)
2) in our ~/.xinitrc we have the following lines (more or less, just be sure the last line is exactly the same)
Code: Select all
#!/bin/bash
# disable blanking
xset s off &
xset -dpms &
# pick a mouse pointer
xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr &
# Ctrl-Alt-Backspace kills the X session (let's keep this in case gnus dies on you)
setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp &
exec emacs -fs
You might argue that this would also work in an x-terminal-emulator with emacs -nw -fs -- that's true, but you wouldn't have the nice PDF displays or image previews in dired.
Extra hint:
You can put the following snipped into your emacs configuration to assign fullscreen to F11 and to set the frame to maximized -- it is optional:
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(defun toggle-fullscreen ()
"Toggle full screen on X11"
(interactive)
(when (eq window-system 'x)
(set-frame-parameter
nil 'fullscreen
(when (not (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen)) 'fullboth))))
(global-set-key [f11] 'toggle-fullscreen)
(custom-set-variables
'(initial-frame-alist (quote ((fullscreen . maximized)))))