Subject: bug#27923: 24.3; -iconic switch screws up geometry

From: martin rudalics <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2017 11:55:34 +0200

> My display is 3840x1200.  I'm pretty sure that's wider than 1900. ;-)

That's bad because it means we are in the area of one of the most
elusive bugs I've seen over the past years.  Your scenario has been
already reported (with .emacs instead of using a resource file) as

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=24526

and probably also here

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=25943

The underlying problem seems to be that the geometry settings for an
invisible or iconified frame get lost somewhere and are not processed
(or even reverted) when the frame is made visible.  On Windows, the bug
manifests itself when specifying the geometry in the init file but not
when the geometry is specified as command argument.  On GNU/Linux the
bug seems to depend on the window manager - I can't reproduce it here on
Debian using Xfwm.

 > In your suggested test, yes, setting default-frame-alist and then
 > creating a new iconified frame does indeed give me the desired
 > properties.

Which suggests that creating the initial frame with its dimensions is
the culprit.  What does M-: RET (frame-width) RET of the deformed frame
print?

 > Please let me know if there are any additional tests you'd like me to perform.

There are.  First I would like to see whether the bug occurs with all
possible invocation scenarios in the same way.  Please invoke Emacs as

emacs -Q --iconic --geometry 80x78+1180+0 --font "-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal-*-15-*-100-100-*-*-ISO8859-1"

as

emacs -Q --iconic --load ~/init.el

with init.el specified as

(setq default-frame-alist
       '((width . 80)
	(height . 78)
	(left . 1180)
	(font . "-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal-*-15-*-100-100-*-*-ISO8859-1")))

and as

emacs -Q --load ~/init.el

with init.el specified as

(setq default-frame-alist
       '((width . 80)
	(height . 78)
	(left . 1180)
	(font . "-misc-fixed-bold-r-normal-*-15-*-100-100-*-*-ISO8859-1")
	(visibility . icon)))

and tell me whether the results are the same.  Also, please tell me what
your original scenario gives with the line specifying the font setting
removed from the resource file.

Thanks, martin

PS: Please keep [email-masked] CC'd