Emacs full-screen shortcut

When you’re writing or coding, you want to remove as many distractions as possible. In addition to obvious things like shutting down you email, IM and twitter clients, it can be helpful to put your editor in full-screen mode. This way, the editor is the only thing visible, so your attention isn’t drawn to menu bars, flashing notifications or bouncing dock icons.

To create a shortcut for fullscreen mode in emacs, put this in your ~/.emacs file:

(defun toggle-fullscreen ()
  (interactive)
  (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen (if (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen)
                                           nil
                                           'fullboth)))
(global-set-key [(meta return)] 'toggle-fullscreen)

Now pressing M-return (usually alt + return on Windows/Linux or `⌘

• return` on a Mac) will toggle Emacs between normal and full screen mode.

Thanks to Vebjorn Ljosa in this thread for this code snippet.