How can I make Emacs stop flickering on resize?

Question

I'm on OS X 10.6.6 and I'm running emacs 23.2. Everytime I try to resize the emacs window and sometimes other types of movement the buffer seems to flicker. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Upgrade to the latest developer build snapshot of Emacs, and upgrade OSX from 10.6.6 to 10.6.8 -- Snow Leopard final -- and problem resolved!

Try out the latest version of Emacs from the nightly build section of the following link after you have upgraded to Snow Leopard 10.6.8. You will note that the description of the Emacs builds specifies that OSX 10.6.8 was used to create them. For those people who may be unfamiliar with the Emacs builds from emacsformacosx.com, the statement on the face-sheet of the website is accurate -- "Pure Emacs! No Extras! No Nonsense!" -- i.e., they are vanilla builds for OSX (built using the option --with-ns).

http://emacsformacosx.com/builds

It makes no sense trying to get an older version of Emacs to work on an older version of Snow Leopard, when upgrading both is so easy.

Upgrading OSX can be done by connecting to the internet, clicking on the Apple logo in the upper left-hand corner of the menu-bar, and then selecting Software Update... and follow the prompts thereafter. Alternatively, the update *.dmg is still available for download on the Apple servers -- combo means that it is capable of upgrading any version of Snow Leopard prior to 10.6.8. In addition, 10.6.8 is needed to utilize the Apple App Store application that is included in the update:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1399/en_US/MacOSXUpdCombo10.6.8.dmg

Answer 2

Have you tried aquamacs? It is designed to fit in more closely with OS X, but is still a fully-functional emacs implementation (up to and including emacs 23 functionality I believe)