1.10 Inhibiting Display of GUI Components

Use of GUI facilities is a personal thing. Almost everyone agrees that drawing via keyboard-based "turtle graphics" is acceptable to hardly anyone if a mouse is available, but conversely emulating a keyboard with a screenful of buttons is a painful experience. But between those extremes the complete novice will require a fair amount of time before toolbars and menus become dispensable, but many an "Ancien Haquer" sees them as a complete waste of precious frame space that could be filled with text.

Display of all of the GUI components created by SXEmacs can be inhibited through the use of Customize. Customize can be accessed through ‘Options | Customize’ in the menu bar, or via M-x customize. Then navigate through the Customize tree to ‘Emacs | Environment’. Scrollbar and toolbar visibility is controlled via the ‘Display’ group, options ‘Scrollbars visible’ and ‘Toolbar visible’ respectively. Gutter visibility is controlled by group ‘Gutter’, option ‘Visible’.

Or they can be controlled directly by M-x customize-variable, by changing the values of the variables menubar-visible-p, scrollbars-visible-p, toolbar-visible-p, or gutter-buffers-tab-visible-p respectively. (The strange form of the last variable is due to the fact that gutters are often used to display transient widgets like progress gauges, which you probably don’t want to inhibit. It is more likely that you want to inhibit the default display of the buffers tab widget, which is what that variable controls. This interface is subject to change depending on developer experience and user feedback.)

Control of frame configuration can controlled automatically according to various parameters such as buffer or frame because these are specifiers (lispref)Specifiers. Using these features requires programming in Lisp; Customize is not yet that sophisticated. Also, components that appear in various positions and orientations can have display suppressed according to position. C-h a visible-p gives a list of variables which can be customized. E.g., to control the visibility of specifically the left-side toolbar only, customize left-toolbar-visible-p.