I don’t know about you, but I always use Emacs maximized.1 It’s my most important tool2 and I want to dedicate to it as much screen real estate as possible. As Emacs doesn’t start in maximized mode by default you have to do one of the following:

  • Maximize it manually (e.g. by clicking the maximize icon)
  • Figure out how to maximize it automatically

I guess by now it should be clear we’ll be going for the second option. As usual with Emacs there are multiple ways to achieve what we want. If you’re the type of person who starts Emacs from the command-line you might try the -mm option:

$ emacs -mm

Furthermore, you can just alias emacs to emacs -mm. Put something like this in your shell configuration:

alias emacs="emacs -mm"

Tip: There’s also emacs -fs that will start Emacs in full-screen mode.

Another simple option would be to add something like this to your Emacs config:

;; the t parameter apends to the hook, instead of prepending
;; this means it'd be run after other hooks that might fiddle
;; with the frame size
(add-hook 'window-setup-hook 'toggle-frame-maximized t)

Here’s the description of windows-setup-hook:

Normal hook run after loading init files and handling the command line. This is very similar to ‘emacs-startup-hook’. The only difference is that this hook runs after frame parameters have been set up in response to any settings from your init file. Unless this matters to you, use ‘emacs-startup-hook’ instead.

By the way, toggle-frame-maximized is an interactive Emacs command that you can use with M-x. There’s also a similar toggle-frame-fullscreen command that does exactly what you’d expect it to do.

Finally, the most granular and slightly more involved solution would be to leverage a couple of frame setup options - namely default-frame-alist and initial-frame-alist. The two accept exactly the same configuration values, but differ in their scope:

  • default-frame-alist is applied to every Emacs frame that you create
  • initial-frame-alist is applied only to the initial (startup) Emacs frame

I prefer the use of initial-frame-alist, as I rarely work with multiple frames anyways:

;; start the initial frame maximized
(add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized))

;; start every frame maximized
(add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(fullscreen . maximized))

For the completely list of frame size options, see this section of the Emacs manual for details. The short version is that you can set the fullscreen3 parameter to one of the following:

  • fullwidth (make the frame as wide as possible, don’t touch the vertical)
  • fullheight (make the frame as tall as possible, don’t touch the horizontal)
  • fullboth (set height and width to to size of the screen)
  • maximized (self-explanatory)

The difference between fullboth and maximized is that you can resize the former with the mouse, while with the latter you cannot.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you learned something useful. Meta-X forever!

  1. From time to time I even use it in full-screen mode, depending on how deep in the zone I am. ↩

  2. Not to mention it’s a pretty decent window manager as well. ↩

  3. I find the name very confusing, but it is how it is. ↩