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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?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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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.

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  • That made my day. However how to prevent other events from poping dialog box? I.e. flymake insist on popping this dialog when it encounters fatal error - which crashes emacs again. Is there a way to do it on global level?
    – radekg
    Mar 31, 2010 at 15:40
  • Actually, for flymake that was as easy as setting the custom-variable.
    – radekg
    Mar 31, 2010 at 16:05
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    In addition to the above, you also need: (defadvice message-box (around prevent-dialog activate) "Prevent message-box from activating a dialog" (apply #'message (ad-get-args 0)))
    – mernst
    Sep 23, 2014 at 10:15
  • This answer did not completely work for me, cmd-T still opens the native font chooser
    – Dustin Getz
    Feb 14, 2015 at 19:01
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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 :-)

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  • Customize asks whether I want to save all changes for the buffer when hitting "Save for futher sessions". I thought in carbon-emacs it uses mini-buffer. :/ I will try setting use-dialog to nil and see whether it helps. But this will happen when I get home. Thanks for the answer!
    – radekg
    Mar 29, 2010 at 7:42
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    custom pops up a dialog if you mouse click a button, and uses the minibuffer if you hit enter on the button
    – Justin Smith
    Apr 9, 2010 at 0:43
  • The main problem for me is things like "cmd-T" for when I thought my browser was focused
    – Dustin Getz
    Feb 14, 2015 at 19:02
  • @DustinGetz, that's a completely different problem underneath. You can fix that by unbinding the particular key, e.g. (global-set-key "\M-t" nil)
    – Ivan Andrus
    Feb 14, 2015 at 21:41

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