1 Known Problems with GNU Emacs
3 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
4 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for license conditions.
9 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
10 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing C-c C-t
11 and browsing through the outline headers. (See C-h m for help on
14 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
16 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
18 * Emacs startup failures
20 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
22 A typical error message might be something like
24 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
26 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
27 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
30 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
32 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
33 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
34 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
36 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
37 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
38 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
40 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
42 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
43 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
44 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
45 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
46 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
47 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
48 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
49 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
52 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
53 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
54 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
55 same directory where system header files are kept.
57 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
59 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
60 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
61 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
62 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
63 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
64 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
66 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
67 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
68 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
69 it constitutes a separate package.
71 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
73 The typical error message might be like this:
75 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
77 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
78 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
79 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
80 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
81 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
82 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
83 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
85 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
86 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
88 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
91 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
92 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
93 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
95 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
97 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
98 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
101 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
103 An example of such an error is:
105 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
107 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
108 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
109 present in load-path:
111 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
113 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
114 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
117 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
119 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
121 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
122 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
124 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
125 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
126 /******************************************************************
128 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
135 + char* begin = NULL;
139 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
142 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
144 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
145 + if (begin != NULL) {
146 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
150 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
154 ** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
156 This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
157 implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
158 using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
160 This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
161 may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
162 happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
163 does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
164 will run it under. For details, see
166 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
170 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
172 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
173 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
174 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
175 happens to exist on your X server).
177 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
179 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
180 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
181 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
183 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
184 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
186 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
187 a segmentation fault and core dump.
189 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
190 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
192 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
194 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
197 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
198 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
199 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
200 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
203 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
205 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
206 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
207 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
208 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
209 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
211 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
212 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
215 ** Emacs crashes when using some version of the Exceed X server.
217 Upgrading to a newer version of Exceed has been reported to prevent
218 these crashes. You should consider switching to a free X server, such
219 as Xming or Cygwin/X.
221 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
223 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
225 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
226 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
227 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
228 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
230 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
231 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
233 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
235 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
236 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
238 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ may loop forever if a display crashes.
240 This is related to the bug above. A scenario for this is when emacs is run
241 as a server, and an X frame is created. If the X server for the frame
242 crashes or exits unexpectedly and an attempt is made to create a new
243 frame on another X display, then a Gtk+ error happens in the emacs
244 server that results in an endless loop. This is not fixed in any known
245 Gtk+ version (2.14.4 being current).
247 * General runtime problems
251 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
253 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
254 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
255 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
256 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
258 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
259 than the corresponding .el file.
261 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
263 These control the actions of Emacs.
264 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
265 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
268 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
269 of them, then try again.
271 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
273 The error message might be something like this:
275 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
277 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
278 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
279 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
282 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
284 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
285 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
286 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
288 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
289 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
290 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
291 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
295 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
297 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
298 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
299 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
300 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
301 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
302 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
304 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
305 them to two different keys.
307 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
309 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
310 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
311 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
313 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
314 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
316 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
317 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
318 another escape character in kermit. One user did
320 set escape-character 17
322 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
324 ** Mailers and other helper programs
326 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
328 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
329 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
330 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
331 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
332 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
335 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
337 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
338 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
339 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
341 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
342 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
343 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
344 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
345 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
346 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
347 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
349 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
350 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
351 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
352 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
358 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
359 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
360 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
361 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
362 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
363 directory copy is ineffective.
365 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
367 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
368 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
370 ** Problems with hostname resolution
372 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
373 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
374 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
375 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
377 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
378 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
379 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
380 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
382 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
383 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
385 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
386 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
388 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
389 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
390 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
391 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
392 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
393 be careful not to lose the others.
395 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
397 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
399 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
400 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
403 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
405 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
407 For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
408 "localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
410 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
411 (i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
412 /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
415 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
416 mail-host-address to the value you want.
420 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
423 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
424 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
425 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
426 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
427 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
428 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
430 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
431 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
432 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
435 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
436 call in the RFS server.
438 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
439 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
440 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
441 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
443 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
445 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
446 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
447 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
448 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
449 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
450 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
451 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
453 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
455 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
456 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
457 retrieving revision 1.2
458 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
459 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
460 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
464 * No return sent for close or fsync!
466 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
467 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
472 * No return sent for close or fsync!
474 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
475 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
481 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
482 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
483 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
485 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
487 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
488 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
489 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
490 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
491 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
492 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
493 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
495 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
496 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
497 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
500 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
501 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
502 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
503 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
505 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
506 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
507 + (insert-file-contents entity)
508 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
509 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
510 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
514 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
517 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
519 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
522 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
524 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
525 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
529 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
531 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
532 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
533 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
534 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
535 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
536 added to the top-level directory.
538 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
539 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
541 ** Miscellaneous problems
543 *** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
545 This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
546 The solution is to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed
547 with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later.
549 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
551 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
552 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
553 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
555 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
558 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
559 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
560 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
563 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
564 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
565 it only if it is undefined.
567 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
569 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
570 happen in a non-login shell.
572 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
574 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
575 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
576 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
577 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
580 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
582 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
586 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
588 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
589 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
590 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
593 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
595 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
597 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
599 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
600 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
601 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
602 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
603 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
604 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
606 update-alternatives --config ftp
608 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
610 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
612 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
613 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
614 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
615 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
617 *** Dired is very slow.
619 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
620 time. Possible reasons for this include:
622 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
623 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
625 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
627 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
629 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
630 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
631 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
632 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
634 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
635 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
637 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
639 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
640 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
641 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
642 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
644 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
646 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
647 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
648 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
650 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
652 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
653 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
654 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
655 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
656 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
658 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
659 process invokes Emacs several times.
661 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
662 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
665 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
666 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
667 specified run-time search path in the executable.
669 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
670 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
671 backtraces like this:
674 0 strcmp(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/xlv22/ficus-jan23/work/irix/lib/libc/libc_n32_M3_ns/strings/strcmp.s":35, 0xfb7e480]
675 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
676 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
677 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
678 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
679 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
680 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
681 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
682 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
684 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
685 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
686 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
687 to work around the problem.
689 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
691 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
692 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
694 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
695 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
696 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
698 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
700 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
701 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
702 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
703 support for 8-bit characters.
705 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
706 this at your shell's prompt:
710 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
711 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
714 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
715 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
716 Then rebuild the speller.
718 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
719 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
721 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
722 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
723 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
724 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
725 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
727 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
728 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
729 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
730 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
732 * Runtime problems related to font handling
734 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
736 *** This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
737 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
738 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with Gtk+ will then use the
739 newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily fixed by
740 stopping the application that has the error (it can be Emacs or any
741 other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1, and then start the
742 application again. If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting
743 doesn't help, the application with problem must be recompiled with the
744 same version of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE,
745 it is sufficient to recompile Qt.
747 *** Some fonts have a missing glyph and no default character. This is
748 known to occur for character number 160 (no-break space) in some
749 fonts, such as Lucida but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte
750 and Latin-1 version of this character to display a space.
752 *** Some of the fonts called for in your fontset may not exist on your
755 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
756 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
757 many different fonts, collected into a fontset. You can remedy the
758 problem by installing additional fonts.
760 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
761 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
762 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
763 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
764 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
765 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
767 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
769 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
770 or the etl-unicode collection (see above).
772 ** Under X, an unexpected monospace font is used as the default font.
774 When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries to use a default font named
775 "monospace". This is a "virtual font", which the operating system
776 (Fontconfig) redirects to a suitable font such as DejaVu Sans Mono.
777 On some systems, there exists a font that is actually named Monospace,
778 which takes over the virtual font. This is considered an operating
781 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-10/msg00696.html
783 If you encounter this problem, set the default font to a specific font
784 in your .Xresources or initialization file. For instance, you can put
785 the following in your .Xresources:
787 Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono 12
789 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it should.
791 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller than
792 the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that lines do not
795 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
797 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
798 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
799 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
802 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
803 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
805 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
806 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
807 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
809 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
811 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
812 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
813 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
814 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
815 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
816 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
817 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
818 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
819 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
820 to the end of a very large buffer.
822 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
823 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
824 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
825 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
827 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
828 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
829 fontification by setting the variable
830 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
831 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
833 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
834 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
836 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
837 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
839 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
840 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
841 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
843 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
845 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
846 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
847 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
848 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
850 A workaround for this is to add something like
852 emacs.waitForWM: false
854 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
855 frame's parameter list, like this:
857 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
859 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
861 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
863 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
864 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
865 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package prior to version 3.0.17.
866 To circumvent this problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties
867 to nil in your `.emacs'.
869 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
870 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
873 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
875 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
876 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
877 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
878 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
879 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
881 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
882 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
884 ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
886 If `tex-fontify-script' is non-nil, tex-mode displays
887 subscript/superscript text in the faces subscript/superscript, which
888 are smaller than the normal font and lowered/raised. With some fonts,
889 nested superscripts (say) can be hard to read. Switching to a
890 different font, or changing your antialiasing setting (on an LCD
891 screen), can both make the problem disappear. Alternatively, customize
892 the following variables: tex-font-script-display (how much to
893 lower/raise); tex-suscript-height-ratio (how much smaller than
894 normal); tex-suscript-height-minimum (minimum height).
896 * Internationalization problems
898 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
900 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
901 do anything about it.
903 ** International characters aren't displayed under X.
907 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
908 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
909 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
910 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
911 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
912 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
913 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
914 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
915 include in the fontset spec:
917 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
918 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
919 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
921 *** Athena/Lucid toolkit limitations
923 The Athena/Lucid toolkit cannot display UTF-8 strings in the menu, so
924 if you have UTF-8 buffer names, the buffer menu won't display the
925 names properly. The GTK+ toolkit works properly.
927 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
929 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
930 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
931 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
933 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
935 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
936 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
937 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
938 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
940 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
941 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
942 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
943 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
944 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
945 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
948 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
950 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
951 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
952 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
953 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
954 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
955 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
957 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
959 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
961 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
964 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
965 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
968 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
970 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
971 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
972 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
973 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
974 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
976 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
978 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
979 (standard-display-european t)
980 That should be changed to
981 (standard-display-european 1 t)
985 ** X keyboard problems
987 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
989 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
990 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
991 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
992 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
994 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
996 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
998 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
999 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1000 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1002 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1004 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1006 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1008 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1009 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1010 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1012 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1013 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1014 However, that requires root access.
1016 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1018 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1020 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1021 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1022 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1023 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1024 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1026 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1028 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1029 for character composition.
1031 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1033 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1034 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1035 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1036 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1039 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1040 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1042 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1044 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1045 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1046 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1047 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1050 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1052 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1053 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1054 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1056 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1057 directly with an X server.
1059 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1060 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1061 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1062 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1063 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1064 have made the key binding correctly.
1066 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1067 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1068 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1071 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1073 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1074 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1076 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1077 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1078 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1079 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1081 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1082 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1083 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1084 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1086 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1087 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1089 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1091 *** Metacity: Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab causes X to be unresponsive.
1093 This happens sometimes when using Metacity. Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab:bing
1094 makes the system unresponsive to the mouse or the keyboard. Killing Emacs
1095 or shifting out from X11 and back again usually cures it (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1
1096 and then Alt-F7). A bug for it is here:
1097 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/231034.
1098 Note that a permanent fix seems to be to disable "assistive technologies".
1100 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1102 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1103 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1104 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1105 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1106 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1107 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1109 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1111 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1112 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1113 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1114 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1117 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1120 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1121 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1124 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1125 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1126 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1127 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1128 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1130 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1131 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1132 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1133 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1134 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1135 present or commented out:
1137 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1138 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1142 It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1143 Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1144 The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1146 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1148 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1149 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1150 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1151 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1152 while, Emacs may print a message:
1154 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1156 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1157 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1159 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1161 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1162 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1163 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1164 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1166 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1167 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1168 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1171 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1172 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1173 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1174 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1175 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1176 used with neXtaw at run time.
1178 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1179 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1182 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1184 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1185 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1186 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1187 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1189 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1190 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1192 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1193 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1194 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1196 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1198 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1199 emulation for which it is set up.
1201 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1202 LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1203 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1204 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1205 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1206 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1209 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1210 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1211 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1214 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1216 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1218 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1220 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1221 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1222 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1223 the resource prevents the problem.
1225 ** General X problems
1227 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1229 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1230 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1231 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1232 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1234 Here's how to do this:
1236 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1238 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1239 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1242 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1244 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1246 The messages might say something like this:
1248 Unable to load color "grey95"
1250 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1252 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1254 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1255 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1256 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1258 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1260 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1261 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1262 X expects to find it.
1264 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1266 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1267 be carried out at the same time:
1269 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1270 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1271 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1272 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1275 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1276 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1277 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1278 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1280 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1284 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1287 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1291 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1292 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1294 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1295 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1296 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1297 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1298 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1299 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
1300 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1301 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1302 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1303 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1304 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1306 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1307 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1308 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1309 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1311 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1313 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1314 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1317 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1319 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1321 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1322 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1324 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1326 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1327 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1328 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1331 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1332 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1333 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1334 workaround can be found.
1336 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1337 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1339 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1341 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1342 that isn't a color.)
1344 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1346 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1348 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1349 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1350 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1353 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1354 your font path, like this:
1356 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1358 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1360 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1362 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1364 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1365 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1366 want, rewrite the resource.
1368 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1369 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1370 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1372 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1373 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1375 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1376 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1379 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1381 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1382 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1383 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1385 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1386 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1388 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1390 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1391 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1392 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1393 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1395 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1396 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1397 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1399 The easy way to do this is to put
1401 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1403 in your site-init.el file.
1405 *** Prevent double pastes in X
1407 The problem: a region, such as a command, is pasted twice when you copy
1408 it with your mouse from GNU Emacs to an xterm or an RXVT shell in X.
1409 The solution: try the following in your X configuration file,
1410 /etc/X11/xorg.conf This should enable both PS/2 and USB mice for
1411 single copies. You do not need any other drivers or options.
1413 Section "InputDevice"
1414 Identifier "Generic Mouse"
1416 Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
1419 * Runtime problems on character terminals
1421 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1423 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1424 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1425 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1426 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1427 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1428 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1429 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1430 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1432 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1434 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1435 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1436 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1438 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1439 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1440 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. (For example, on a VT220
1441 you may select "No XOFF" in the setup menu.) Sometimes there is an
1442 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1443 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1444 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1446 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1447 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1448 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1449 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1450 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1451 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1452 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1453 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1454 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1456 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1457 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1458 codes. You might as well try it.
1460 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1461 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1462 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1463 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1464 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1465 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1466 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1467 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1469 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1470 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1471 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1472 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1473 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1476 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1477 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1478 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1479 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1480 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1482 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1483 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1486 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1487 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1488 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1489 automatically. Here is an example:
1491 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1493 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1494 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1497 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1498 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1499 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1500 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1501 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1502 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1503 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1504 of inferior systems.
1506 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1508 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1509 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1510 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1511 that wants to use flow control.
1513 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1514 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1515 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1517 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1518 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1519 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1521 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1523 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1524 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1525 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1527 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1528 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1529 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1530 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1531 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1532 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1533 There are several possibilities:
1535 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1537 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1538 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1540 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1541 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1544 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1545 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1546 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1547 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1548 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1549 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1551 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1553 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1554 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1555 for certain terminals.
1557 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1558 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1560 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1561 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1563 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1565 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1566 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1567 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1568 control on the local system. Sometimes `rlogin -8' will avoid this
1571 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1572 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1573 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1574 "stty start u stop u" will do this. On some systems, use
1575 "stty -ixon" instead.
1577 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1578 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1579 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1581 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1582 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1583 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1584 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1586 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1588 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1591 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1593 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1594 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1595 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1596 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1597 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1598 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1600 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1601 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1602 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1603 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1604 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1605 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1606 time as the operations really take.
1608 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1609 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1610 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1611 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1612 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1613 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1614 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1615 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1616 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1617 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1619 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1620 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1621 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1622 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1623 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1624 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1627 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1628 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1629 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1631 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1632 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1634 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1636 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1639 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1640 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1641 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1642 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1643 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1646 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1647 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1648 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1649 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1650 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1651 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1653 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1654 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1655 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1656 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1658 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1660 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1661 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1662 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1663 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1664 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1665 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1666 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1669 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1670 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1671 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1672 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1673 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1674 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1675 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1678 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1679 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1680 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1681 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1683 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1684 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1685 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1686 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1689 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1690 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1691 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1692 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1694 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1695 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1696 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1697 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1698 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1699 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1701 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1705 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1707 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1708 read corrupted process output.
1710 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1712 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1713 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1715 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1716 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1720 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1723 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1724 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1726 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1727 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1730 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1731 the Meta key stops working.
1733 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1734 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1735 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1736 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1737 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1738 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1739 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1741 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1742 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1743 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1744 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1745 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1748 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1750 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1751 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1753 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1755 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1756 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1757 keys can serve as Meta.
1759 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1760 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1762 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1764 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1765 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1767 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1768 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1769 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1770 networked and non-networked machines.
1772 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1774 **** Networked Case.
1776 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1777 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1778 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1782 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1788 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1789 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1790 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1791 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1793 **** Non-Networked Case.
1795 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1796 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1797 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1798 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1799 file is not necessary with this approach.
1801 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1803 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1804 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1805 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1806 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1807 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1808 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1809 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1812 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1813 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1814 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1815 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1816 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1817 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1819 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1820 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1821 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1822 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1824 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1825 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1827 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1829 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1830 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1831 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1832 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1834 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1838 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1839 directories that have the +t bit.
1841 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1842 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1843 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1844 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1846 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1847 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1849 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1851 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1852 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1853 current keymap to a file with the command
1855 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1857 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1858 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1859 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1862 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1864 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1866 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1870 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1872 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1874 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1875 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1876 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1877 but tty is giving it back 3.
1879 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1882 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1884 should be changed to:
1886 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1888 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1891 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1893 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1894 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1895 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1896 value is just ten seconds.
1898 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1900 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1901 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1903 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1904 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1905 configures the X server.
1907 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1908 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1909 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1914 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1916 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1917 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1920 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1921 Emacs built with Motif.
1923 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1924 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1926 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1928 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1929 rights, containing this text:
1931 --------------------------------
1932 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1933 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1934 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1939 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1941 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1942 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1944 --------------------------------
1946 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1948 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1952 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
1954 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1955 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
1957 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
1959 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
1961 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1962 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
1964 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
1966 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1967 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1968 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1969 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
1971 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
1973 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1974 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1975 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1976 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
1978 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1979 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1981 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1982 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1983 Definitions" to make them defined.
1987 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
1988 section on legacy systems.
1990 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
1992 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1993 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
1995 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
1997 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
1998 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
1999 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2000 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2002 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2004 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2005 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2006 makes the problem stop:
2008 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2009 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2010 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2011 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2013 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2014 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2016 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2017 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2018 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2020 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2022 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2023 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2025 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2026 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2028 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2030 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2032 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2033 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2035 You can fix this by editing the file:
2037 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2039 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2041 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2045 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2047 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2049 *** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error
2050 "Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)".
2051 This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g
2052 and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by
2053 compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations.
2057 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2059 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2061 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2063 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2064 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2065 to allocate ptys reliably.
2067 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2069 ** PATH can contain unexpanded environment variables
2071 Old releases of TCC (version 9) and 4NT (up to version 8) do not correctly
2072 expand App Paths entries of type REG_EXPAND_SZ. When Emacs is run from TCC
2073 and such an entry exists for emacs.exe, exec-path will contain the
2074 unexpanded entry. This has been fixed in TCC 10. For more information,
2077 ** Setting w32-pass-rwindow-to-system and w32-pass-lwindow-to-system to nil
2078 does not prevent the Start menu from popping up when the left or right
2079 ``Windows'' key is pressed.
2081 This was reported to happen when XKeymacs is installed. At least with
2082 XKeymacs Version 3.47, deactivating XKeymacs when Emacs is active is
2083 not enough to avoid its messing with the keyboard input. Exiting
2084 XKeymacs completely is reported to solve the problem.
2086 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2088 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2089 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2091 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2092 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2093 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2095 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2097 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2098 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2101 ** Emacs crashes when opening a file with a UNC path and rails-mode is loaded.
2103 Loading rails-mode seems to interfere with UNC path handling. This has been
2104 reported as a bug against both Emacs and rails-mode, so look for an updated
2105 rails-mode that avoids this crash, or avoid using UNC paths if using
2108 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.3
2110 M-x term does not work on MS-Windows. TTY emulation on Windows is
2111 undocumented, and programs such as stty which are used on posix platforms
2112 to control tty emulation do not exist for native windows terminals.
2114 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2115 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2116 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2117 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2118 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2120 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2121 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2122 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2123 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2124 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2125 pop-up menu interaction.
2127 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2128 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2130 When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2131 screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2132 "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2133 characters: Bold fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some
2134 characters could appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under
2135 ClearType, characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box.
2136 Emacs 21 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and
2137 has some code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently,
2138 this display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A
2139 workaround is to disable ClearType.
2141 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2142 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2143 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2144 after moving back into it.
2146 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2147 not as severely as in 21.1.
2149 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2150 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2152 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
2153 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2154 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2155 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2156 input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2157 appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2158 example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2160 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2162 (Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2163 the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2164 that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2165 should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2166 this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2169 To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2170 must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2171 META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2173 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2175 The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2176 of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2177 encoding appropriate to that environment.
2179 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2180 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2181 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2184 The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2185 non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2186 daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
2188 Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
2189 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2190 well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2191 on `file-attributes'.
2193 Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2194 You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2196 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2198 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2199 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2200 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2201 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2202 or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the
2203 Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional
2204 and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that
2205 changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP,
2206 in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".)
2208 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2210 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2211 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2212 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2213 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2214 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2216 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2218 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2219 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2220 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2221 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2222 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2225 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2226 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2227 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2228 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2229 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2230 client's executable. For example:
2232 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2234 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2235 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2237 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2239 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2241 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2242 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2244 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2245 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2246 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2247 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2250 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2251 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2252 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2253 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2255 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2257 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2258 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2259 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2260 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2262 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2263 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2264 or disable it entirely.
2266 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2268 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2269 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2270 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2271 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2272 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2273 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2274 generic mouse driver might help.
2276 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2278 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2279 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2280 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2281 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2283 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2284 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2285 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2288 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2289 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2291 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2293 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2294 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2295 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2296 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2297 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2298 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2300 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2302 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2303 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2304 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2305 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2307 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2308 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2309 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2311 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2312 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2313 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2316 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2317 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2318 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2321 * Build-time problems
2325 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2327 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2328 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2329 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2331 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2332 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2333 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2334 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2335 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2336 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2338 *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2340 This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2341 configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2342 CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2343 CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2344 see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2346 The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2347 for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2350 *** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2352 The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2353 to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2354 preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2355 is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2356 whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2357 this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2358 ``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2359 The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2360 (pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2364 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2366 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2367 (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2368 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2369 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2370 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2371 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2372 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2373 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2375 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2376 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2377 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2378 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2380 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2381 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2382 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2383 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2384 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2385 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2386 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2387 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2390 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2391 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2392 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2393 to work around the problem.
2395 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2396 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2397 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2398 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2400 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2402 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2404 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2406 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2407 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2408 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2409 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2410 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2411 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2412 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2413 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2416 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2417 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2418 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2419 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2420 run the script like this:
2422 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2424 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2427 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2428 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2430 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2431 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2433 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2434 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2435 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2438 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2440 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2441 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2442 Emacs's configure script.
2444 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2446 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2447 files are installed. Then use:
2449 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2450 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2452 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2454 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
2456 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2457 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2458 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2459 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2460 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2461 reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2462 these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
2463 4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2464 in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
2466 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2468 Emacs may not build using some Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2469 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2470 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2471 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2473 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2475 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2477 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2478 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2479 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2481 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2483 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2484 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2485 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2487 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2488 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2492 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2494 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2496 #else /* debugging enabled */
2500 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2502 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2504 #else /* debugging enabled */
2507 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2509 Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2510 with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
2511 some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
2512 dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2513 conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2514 is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2516 We recommend the use of the MinGW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2517 not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2518 software like Emacs.
2520 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio fails compiling emacs.rc
2522 If the build fails with the following message then the problem
2523 described here most likely applies:
2525 ../nt/emacs.rc(1) : error RC2176 : old DIB in icons\emacs.ico; pass it
2528 The Emacs icon contains a high resolution PNG icon for Vista, which is
2529 not recognized by older versions of the resource compiler. There are
2530 several workarounds for this problem:
2531 1. Use Free MinGW tools to compile, which do not have this problem.
2532 2. Install the latest Windows SDK.
2533 3. Replace emacs.ico with an older or edited icon.
2537 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2538 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2540 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2541 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2542 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2543 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2544 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2547 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2551 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2552 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2554 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2556 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2557 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2561 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2562 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2564 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2565 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2566 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2568 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2569 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2572 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2576 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2579 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2581 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2583 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2585 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2587 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2588 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2590 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2592 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2594 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2596 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2597 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2598 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2599 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2600 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2602 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2606 Bootstrapping (compiling the .el files) is normally only necessary
2607 with CVS builds, since the .elc files are pre-compiled in releases.
2609 *** "No rule to make target" with Ubuntu 8.04 make 3.81-3build1
2611 Compiling the lisp files fails at random places, complaining:
2612 "No rule to make target `/path/to/some/lisp.elc'".
2613 The causes of this problem are not understood. Using GNU make 3.81 compiled
2614 from source, rather than the Ubuntu version, worked. See Bug#327,821.
2618 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2620 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
2621 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2622 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2623 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2624 instructions can be useful.
2625 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2626 newer). Read the next item.
2628 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2629 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2630 workaround is known.
2632 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2634 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2636 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2637 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2638 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2640 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2642 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2643 execution of this command:
2645 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2647 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2648 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2649 command when running temacs like this:
2651 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2654 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2656 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2657 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2658 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2659 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2660 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2663 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2667 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2669 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2671 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2672 Makefile in the src subdirectory.
2674 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2675 space available on the machine.
2677 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2678 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2679 for large blocks (many pages).
2681 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2682 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2683 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2684 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2686 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2687 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2688 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2690 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2691 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2692 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2693 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2694 when unpacking the shell archive.
2696 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2697 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2698 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2700 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2701 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2703 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2704 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2705 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2706 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2707 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2708 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2709 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2710 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2711 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2712 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2713 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2715 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2717 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2719 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2720 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2721 space than was allocated.
2723 This could be caused by
2724 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2725 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2726 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2727 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2728 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2729 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2731 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2732 (not from the directory you expected).
2733 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2734 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2735 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2736 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2739 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2740 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2742 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2743 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2746 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2748 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2749 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2751 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2753 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2754 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2755 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2756 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2758 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2759 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2760 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2761 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2762 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2763 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2764 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2767 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2768 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2769 know what's really going on here. */
2770 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2772 #if defined __linux__
2773 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2774 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2779 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2780 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2783 *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2785 The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
2786 --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
2787 to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
2788 build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2789 GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2790 occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
2792 *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2794 This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2795 It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2799 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2801 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2802 supplies the `install-info' command.
2804 *** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2806 For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2807 with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2808 Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2809 must re-configure without using spaces.
2811 *** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2813 Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2814 correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2815 as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2816 occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2819 *** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2821 The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2822 build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2823 outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2824 out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2825 make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2826 macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2827 used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2828 step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2829 installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
2830 10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2831 Software Companion CDROM.
2833 The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2834 out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2835 without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2836 from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2840 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2842 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2843 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2844 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2845 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2847 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2849 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2850 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2852 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2854 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2856 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2857 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2858 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2859 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2861 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2862 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2863 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2864 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2865 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2869 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2871 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2872 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2873 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2874 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2876 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2878 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2880 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2881 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2882 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2884 ** Ancient operating systems
2886 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2888 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2890 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2891 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2893 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2894 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2895 X11Dev... with smit.
2897 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2899 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2901 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2902 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2903 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2904 treated as control characters.
2906 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2907 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2909 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2911 Could not load program emacs
2912 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2913 Error was: Exec format error
2917 Could not load program .emacs
2918 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2919 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2920 Error was: Exec format error
2922 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2923 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2925 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2927 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2928 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2932 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2934 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2935 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2936 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2937 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2938 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2940 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2941 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2943 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2945 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2947 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2948 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2949 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2950 communicating through pipes.
2954 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
2956 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2959 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
2961 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2962 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
2964 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
2966 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2967 003082 August 11, 1998.
2971 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
2973 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2976 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
2978 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2979 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2980 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
2982 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2984 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2985 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
2987 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2988 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
2992 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
2994 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2995 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2998 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
3000 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3001 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3002 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
3004 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
3006 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3007 version of Solaris that you are using.
3009 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
3011 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3012 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
3014 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
3016 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
3018 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3019 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3020 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3021 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3022 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
3024 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3025 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3026 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3029 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3030 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3031 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3033 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3034 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3036 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3037 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3039 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3042 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3043 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3045 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3046 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3049 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3054 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3056 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3060 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3061 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3062 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3063 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3064 definition for your type of machine and system.
3066 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3067 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3068 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3070 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3071 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3072 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3075 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3077 #define ThreadedX YES
3079 #define ThreadedX NO
3080 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3081 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3082 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3084 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3086 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3087 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3088 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3089 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3090 described in the Solaris FAQ
3091 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3092 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3094 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3095 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3096 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3097 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3098 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3099 and the default CFLAGS.
3101 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3103 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3104 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3105 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3106 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3107 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3108 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3109 are currently recommended for your host.
3111 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3112 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3113 105284-18 might fix it again.
3115 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3117 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3118 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3119 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3120 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3122 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3123 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3124 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3125 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3128 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3129 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3132 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3134 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3135 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3137 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3139 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3140 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3143 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3145 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3147 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3149 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3150 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3151 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3152 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3153 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3154 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3156 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3158 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3160 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3161 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3162 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3165 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3167 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3168 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3169 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3170 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3173 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3175 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3176 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3177 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3178 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3180 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3181 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3183 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3184 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3185 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3186 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3190 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3192 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3193 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3194 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3196 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3198 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3199 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3200 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3202 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3203 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3204 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3205 configure script) that reads:
3206 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3207 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3210 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3212 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3213 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3215 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3217 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3218 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3219 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3220 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3223 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3225 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3226 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3227 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3228 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3231 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3234 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3236 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3237 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3238 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3239 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3242 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3243 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3244 on the network that can log on to the host.
3246 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3247 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3248 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3251 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3252 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3253 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3254 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3256 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3258 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3259 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3261 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3263 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3264 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3265 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3267 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3269 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3271 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3273 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3274 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3275 fonts, so it does not work.
3277 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3278 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3279 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3280 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3281 resources affect Emacs also:
3283 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3284 *Background: scoBackground
3285 *Foreground: scoForeground
3287 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3288 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3290 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3291 Emacs*Background: white
3292 Emacs*Foreground: black
3294 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3295 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3296 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3297 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3298 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3299 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3300 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3301 Open Desktop display.
3303 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3304 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3306 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3308 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3309 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3310 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3311 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3314 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3316 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3317 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3318 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3319 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3320 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3321 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3323 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3324 But you have to be root to do it.
3326 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3328 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3329 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3330 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3331 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3332 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3334 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3335 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3339 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3341 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3342 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3343 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3345 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3346 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3348 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3351 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3353 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3355 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3356 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3358 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3359 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3362 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3363 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3364 communicate with the subprocess.
3366 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3367 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3368 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3371 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3375 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3376 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3383 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3391 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3396 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3397 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3404 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3412 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3416 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3418 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3419 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3421 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3423 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3424 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3425 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3426 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3428 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3430 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3431 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3432 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3433 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3438 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT or later, "config msdos" fails.
3440 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3441 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3442 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3443 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3444 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3446 *** When Emacs compiled with DJGPP runs on Windows 2000 and later, it cannot
3447 find your HOME directory.
3449 This was reported to happen when you click on "Save for future
3450 sessions" button in a Customize buffer. You might see an error
3451 message like this one:
3453 basic-save-buffer-2: c:/FOO/BAR/~dosuser/: no such directory
3455 (The telltale sign is the "~USER" part at the end of the directory
3456 Emacs complains about, where USER is your username or the literal
3457 string "dosuser", which is the default username set up by the DJGPP
3458 startup file DJGPP.ENV.)
3460 This happens when the functions `user-login-name' and
3461 `user-real-login-name' return different strings for your username as
3462 Emacs sees it. To correct this, make sure both USER and USERNAME
3463 environment variables are set to the same value. Windows 2000 and
3464 later sets USERNAME, so if you want to keep that, make sure USER is
3465 set to the same value. If you don't want to set USER globally, you
3466 can do it in the [emacs] section of your DJGPP.ENV file.
3468 *** When Emacs compiled with DJGPP runs on Vista, it runs out of memory.
3470 If Emacs running on Vista displays "!MEM FULL!" in the mode line, you
3471 are hitting the memory allocation bugs in the Vista DPMI server. See
3472 msdos/INSTALL for how to work around these bugs (search for "Vista").
3474 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3477 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3478 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3479 compilation are not the same. See msdos/INSTALL for the explanation
3480 of how to avoid this problem.
3482 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3484 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3486 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3487 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3488 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3489 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3490 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3491 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3492 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3493 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3494 your system works as before.
3496 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3498 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3499 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3500 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3501 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3502 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3504 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3505 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3506 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3507 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3509 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3510 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3511 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3512 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3513 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3515 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3516 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3517 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3519 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3520 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3521 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3523 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3525 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3527 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3528 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3529 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3531 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3532 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3533 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3534 incorrect library functions.
3536 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3537 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3539 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3540 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3541 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3542 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3544 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3545 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3548 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3549 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3550 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3551 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3552 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3553 compiled with DJGPP v2). The file msdos/INSTALL explains this issue
3556 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3557 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3558 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3559 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3560 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3561 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3564 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3566 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3568 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3569 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3570 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3571 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3572 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3574 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3576 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3578 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3579 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3581 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3583 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3585 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3587 This shell command should fix it:
3589 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3591 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3594 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3595 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3597 * Build problems on legacy systems
3599 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3601 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3602 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3605 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3606 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3608 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3609 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3611 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3613 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3615 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3617 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3618 were built for an older system version,
3620 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3622 made the problem go away.
3624 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3626 If you get errors such as
3628 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3629 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3630 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3632 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3633 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3634 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3635 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3636 ones available when you build Emacs.
3638 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3640 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3642 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3644 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3646 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3648 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3649 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3650 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3652 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3653 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3655 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3657 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3658 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3659 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3660 with a floating point option other than the default.
3662 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3663 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3664 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3665 floating point option: -fsoft.
3667 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3669 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3671 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3673 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3675 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3676 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3678 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3679 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3680 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3681 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3682 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3683 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3684 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3686 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3687 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3688 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3689 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3690 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3693 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3694 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3699 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3700 causes the problem to go away.
3701 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3702 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3704 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3706 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3707 These are some that have been observed.
3709 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3710 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3711 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3713 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3715 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3716 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3717 simpler expressions.
3719 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3721 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3722 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3724 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3729 test ((int *) arg.y);
3732 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3733 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3734 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3736 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3739 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3741 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3742 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3743 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3745 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3749 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3751 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
3752 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3753 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
3754 (at your option) any later version.
3756 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3757 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3758 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3759 GNU General Public License for more details.
3761 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3762 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
3767 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3770 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a