Hello,

This is one for the books, and I'm at wits end, so I'll describe the problem that I'm having here, and see if anyone has seen this. I'm running RedHat Enterprise Linux.

I have (as an installed package) emacs and also XEmacs (which I downloaded). Both of these work properly in and of themselves. However, the only work when I run them in the xterm window (ie, no '&') after the command.

When I try to run them in the background, nothing happens, until I hit CR, at which point the [1]+ PID message come to standard out to tell me that the process has been suspended. This happens with both emacs and xemacs, but none of the other applications with a standalone GUI seem to behave this way. I've never seen this before on any other distro that I've used.

This is where it gets even weirder. I did a "which" to see where emacs is executed and noticed that there is one in /usr/bin and one in /usr/local/bin, which is first in the path. When I type /usr/bin/emacs & it brings emacs up in its own window, as per normal. However, when I run it from the local bin, or with just the command, it suspends the process, as above.

With xemacs, it doesn't matter where it is. Whether it's in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin, it still behaves as described above.

Any thoughts? I've been at this for a few hours, googling and what-not, and I'm absolutely mystified.

Thanks in advance...

well it sounds like you have a homebrew version of emacs in /usr/local that has been compiled without x window support.

just to be sure try in your ~/.emacs file
(setq pop-up-frames t)

can't help with x-emacs