How to make emacs work well with tiling window managers?

Question

Under some conditions Emacs will try to resize a frame if its not fullscreen or maximized.

(specifically default-text-scale, but I don't think its the only one).

This sends window-manager window (aka Emacs frame) resize commands, which get ignored, making the frame flicker when scaling fonts for eg.

Running toggle-frame-maximized solves this until the window manager moves the frame which resets Emacs internal state.

I tried:

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

Which works at startup until the frame is moved.

How to configure Emacs so it's always maximized, or so that plugins don't think it's possible to resize the frame?

Tested with spectrwm and notion window managers.

I suggest that you mention which window manager you are using. — mikado
– mikado, Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 16:32
You might want to set frame-resize-pixelwise to t, as it will prevent the window from resizing according to font size. It works well for me with dwm. — user12563
– user12563, Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 17:29
@mikado notion / spectrwm, @DoMiNeLa10 doesn't resolve issue w/ default-text-scale — ideasman42
– ideasman42, Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 21:13
Are you using the newest version of Emacs? Double buffering got added recently, and it effectively gets rid of flickering. — user12563
– user12563, Commented Feb 6, 2019 at 22:49

Loren Riccie · Accepted Answer · 2025-03-29 16:42:34Z

(setq frame-resize-pixelwise t) worked for me as emacsclient frames were always too short and not tiled properly within Kde/wayland

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