Dropdown buffer menu for emacs 25.1 doesn't show new buffers

2
votes

I have just installed emacs 25.1 on a machine with an Ubuntu 17.04 OS. However, drop-down buffer list only list the 3 initial buffers (i.e. GNU Emacs, scatch and messages), regardless of which buffers I've opened. C-x C-b gives me an accurate list of open buffers, and the value of my buffers-menu-max-size is 10.

What can I do so that the drop-down menu for buffers accurately reflects my open buffers and can be used to switch between them?

1
emacsmenu
Does this behavior persist when launching with emacs -Q? - 0x5453
No, it does not. The difference does not seem, however, to be the -Q option, but instead, when I open emacs from a terminal, everything works. When I use Ubuntu's launcher to start emacs, I get the problem I noted. I still don't know how to fix, but now expect I need to ask a different question. - user1245262
Interesting. Does M-: (redisplay) or M-: (menu-bar-update-buffers) help at all? - 0x5453
No, that doesn't seem to do anything. The difference seems to be that when I type emacs in a terminal, it's equivalent to typing /usr/bin/emacs, which is a softlink to /etc/alternatives/emacs, which is a softlink to /usr/bin/emacs25-x. Ubuntu's launcher runs the command '/usr/bin/emacs25 %F', which softlinks to emacs25-x. I assume this means /usr/bin/emacs25-x. When I run /usr/bin/emacs25-x directly, I recreate my problem, when I use the softlink through /etc/alternatives/emacs, my problem goes away. I don't understand this at all... - user1245262

1 Answers

0
votes

I had the same problem with emacs 25.2.2 running in ubuntu 18.04. I followed user1245262's suggestion and ran it from terminal, and the problem went away. So it seems to be related to default behaviour of Ubuntu Unity, where menus for a window are shown in the Unity menu bar at the top, rather than in the window's title bar. By changing this default behaviour (settings->appearance->behavior) you can then launch emacs from the Unity launcher and the buffer menu problem is fixed.