Amit's Thoughts: 2008-05

From Amit’s Thoughts

Emacs: full screen on Mac OS X #

The methods for toggling full screen on Emacs/Mac vary by version. I've reorganized this post to document what I've used for various versions of Emacs. As of 2012-11-01 I was using the Yamamoto Mitsuharu version of Emacs, which has a very nice full screen mode; as of 2014-01-01 I switched to the Emacs 24.4 nightlies from EmacsForMacOSX.com, but I also suggest looking at the railwaycat emacs build, which is also available on Homebrew.

Carbon Emacs 22.2

You can run M-x mac-toggle-max-window to toggle full screen mode, with no menubar. This is handy enough that I've bound it to ⌘ Cmd+Return, which is similar to what some Linux and Windows apps use to toggle full screen mode.

(define-key global-map [(alt return)] 
  'mac-toggle-max-window)

Carbon Emacs 22.5

They seem to have removed the function from 22.2, but you can get it back with this code from Vebjorn Lsoja:

(defun mac-toggle-max-window ()
  (interactive)
  (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen 
    (if (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen)
      nil
      'fullboth))) 

Yamamoto Mitsuharu's Emacs Port

Use the mac-toggle-max-window function definition above.

GNU (Cocoa/Nextstep) Emacs 23

Neither approach above works with this version. Instead I'm using a patched version of maxframe.el, and this function from the EmacsWiki page:

(defvar maxframe-maximized-p nil "maxframe is in fullscreen mode")
(defun toggle-maxframe ()
  "Toggle maximized frame"
  (interactive)
  (setq maxframe-maximized-p (not maxframe-maximized-p))
  (cond (maxframe-maximized-p (maximize-frame))
        (t (restore-frame))))
(define-key global-map [(alt return)] 'toggle-maxframe)

Unfortunately this doesn't hide the menubar or titlebar.

For other versions, check the EmacsWiki page to see if there's a method that works on the version you run, or check this page for Aquamacs.

Labels: emacs, howto, mac