Would dropping X altogether hurt ?

Question

Hi,

I live in the linux terminal all the time under my slackware GNU/linux system (an EeePC). By default, GNU Emacs won't start if It can't find several Xorg libraries. Assuming I will never use X software at all, would it make sense for me to drop all this Xorg stuff and compile emacs again ?

Are you aware of anything that could get me into troubles or making GNU Emacs not working at all ? Are there any advantage for me to keep all these dependencies ?

I am asking since as said, my main box is an eeepc with little storage and I am dangerously hitting the limits ;-)

At the very least, what would be smallest and minimal Xorg libraries one should keep to launch xterm (with a deported display) ?

Regards

Answer 1

You should be fine building an Emacs without X as long as you're happy having it locked up inside a terminal.

On several (remote) machines I work on, I've always installed/built Emacs without X-Windows for similar reasons.

Answer 2

Well... I'm usually using vim... ;-)

I usually install Debian's vim-nox package which is simply vim compiled with everything except GUI; I do that even on my workstations, where I do have full GNOME environment. I simply like the way vim works in the same terminal window I do other things.

When I tried emacs some time ago, the first thing I changed was to disable its GUI; I don't actually know how much did I lose, because I didn't know emacs very well--still I found no essential functionality removed.

You should try. You can always go back to the standard compilation.

Answer 3

As long as you're happy living without the mouse, there is no disadvantage to using Emacs as a terminal-only editor. And I see no advantage to having it loaded if you're not using it.

If you were using a more sophisticated Linux distribution, such as Debian, you could install something like emacs23-nox and get Emacs compiled without linking to any X library. You might see if Slackware provides a similar package. Or if the alien tool can convert the Debian package. Or as a last resort, change distros.

If Slackware doesn't provide a suitable package, you certainly have grounds for requesting one.

(Having said all that, I probably would find that the best use of my time is just to live with whatever version of Emacs my distro provides.)

Answer 4

Emacs is pretty easy to build, though you might have to spend some time getting the build options right. The included INSTALL file is pretty good.

Since it's mainly a text-based tool, Emacs works well in a console. (Who uses the silly toobar anyway?!) And the menu bar's main advantages are for discovering the features of newly installed libraries and for printing. But you can even access that from a tty with M-x tmm-menubar.

Having said that, you do have to reckon with the loss of a few key combinations which some Emacs packages make default use of. For example, one of the great reasons to use Emacs these days is org-mode, which makes heavy use of modifier keys + arrows to manipulate outline structures. In a Linux console, some of these are take for other purposes, so you have to live with a few workarounds. I've seen other convenience packages (for moving around visible windows, for example), that also use those keys.

Good luck.