C.12 Icons

Most window managers allow you to “iconify” a frame, removing it from sight, and leaving a small, distinctive “icon” window in its place. Clicking on the icon window makes the frame itself appear again. If you have many clients running at once, you can avoid cluttering up the screen by iconifying most of the clients.

‘-nbi’

‘--no-bitmap-icon’

Do not use a picture of a gnu as the Emacs icon.

‘-iconic’

‘--iconic’

Start Emacs in iconified state.

By default Emacs uses an icon window containing a picture of the GNU gnu. The ‘-nbi’ or ‘--no-bitmap-icon’ option tells Emacs to let the window manager choose what sort of icon to use—usually just a small rectangle containing the frame's title.

The ‘-iconic’ option tells Emacs to begin running as an icon, rather than showing a frame right away. In this situation, the icon is the only indication that Emacs has started; the text frame doesn't appear until you deiconify it.