How to fix emacs popup dialogs on Mac OS X?

Question

I'm out of ideas here - my emacs crashes when popup dialog is opened. The x-popup-dialog function is probably to blame but I found no workaround to this. My Emacs version is 23.1.1 . Unfortunately some functionality of emacs calls this (e.x. customize asks whether it should save the changes) which causes the crash.

Does anybody know how to fix it or disable it?

Answer 1

Here's a quick elisp bit that will completely disable the graphical dialog for you:

(defadvice yes-or-no-p (around prevent-dialog activate)
  "Prevent yes-or-no-p from activating a dialog"
  (let ((use-dialog-box nil))
    ad-do-it))
(defadvice y-or-n-p (around prevent-dialog-yorn activate)
  "Prevent y-or-n-p from activating a dialog"
  (let ((use-dialog-box nil))
    ad-do-it))

Add this to your .emacs and it'll disable the use of the graphical dialog for the two forms of yes-or-no prompts that emacs uses.

Answer 2

Wow. I had never noticed that, but x-popup-dialog seems to be a problem for me too. At least the example dialog crashed for me. How do you get customize to bring up a dialog? I can't reproduce it.

In general the rule is: if you do it from the keyboard it won't use up a dialog. e.g. use C-x k instead of the mouse to close a buffer and you'll get no dialog. Another, more heavy-handed way, is to set use-dialog-box to nil (though that doesn't stop x-popup-dialog from working if called directly so it may not fix the problem). To fix that you would probably have to advise x-popup-dialog, reimplement it using for example completing-read and never call ad-do-it. Or you could fix the bug. I'm not sure which would be easier :-)