I'm trying to detect the size of the screen I'm starting emacs on, and adjust the size and position the window it is starting in (I guess that's the frame in emacs-speak) accordingly. I'm trying to set up my .emacs so that I always get a "reasonably-big" window with it's top-left corner near the top-left of my screen.
I guess this is a big ask for the general case, so to narrow things down a bit I'm most interested in GNU Emacs 22 on Windows and (Debian) Linux.
Taken from: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/old/faq4.html
(setq default-frame-alist
'((top . 200) (left . 400)
(width . 80) (height . 40)
(cursor-color . "white")
(cursor-type . box)
(foreground-color . "yellow")
(background-color . "black")
(font . "-*-Courier-normal-r-*-*-13-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1")))
(setq initial-frame-alist '((top . 10) (left . 30)))
The first setting applies to all emacs frames including the first one that pops up when you start. The second setting adds additional attributes to the first frame. This is because it is sometimes nice to know the original frame that you start emacs in.
The easiest way I've found to do that in an X-Window environment is through X resources. The relevant part of my .Xdefaults looks like this:
Emacs.geometry: 80x70
You should be able to suffix it with +0+0 location coordinates to force it to the upper-left corner of your display. (the reason I don't do it is that I occasionnally spawn new frames, and it makes things confusing if they appear in the exact same location as the previous one)
According to the manual, this technique works on MS Windows too, storing the resources as key/value pairs in the registry. I never tested that. It might be great, it might be much more of an inconvenience compared to simply editing a file.
I've got the following in my .emacs:
(if (window-system)
(set-frame-height (selected-frame) 60))
You might also look at the functions set-frame-size, set-frame-position, and set-frame-width. Use C-h f (aka M-x describe-function) to bring up detailed documentation.
I'm not sure if there's a way to compute the max height/width of a frame in the current windowing environment.
If you want to change the size according to resolution you can do something like this (adjusting the preferred width and resolutions according to your specific needs):
(defun set-frame-size-according-to-resolution ()
(interactive)
(if window-system
(progn
;; use 120 char wide window for largeish displays
;; and smaller 80 column windows for smaller displays
;; pick whatever numbers make sense for you
(if (> (x-display-pixel-width) 1280)
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist (cons 'width 120))
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist (cons 'width 80)))
;; for the height, subtract a couple hundred pixels
;; from the screen height (for panels, menubars and
;; whatnot), then divide by the height of a char to
;; get the height we want
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist
(cons 'height (/ (- (x-display-pixel-height) 200) (frame-char-height)))))))
(set-frame-size-according-to-resolution)
You can also the -geometry parameter when firing up emacs: emacs -geometry 80x60+20+30 will give you a window 80 characters wide, 60 rows high, with the top left corner 20 pixels to the right and 30 pixels down from the top left corner of the background.
On windows, you could make emacs frame maximized using this function :
(defun w32-maximize-frame ()
"Maximize the current frame"
(interactive)
(w32-send-sys-command 61488))