1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
3 and browsing through the outline headers.
5 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 22.
7 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
9 * Emacs startup failures
11 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
13 A typical error message might be something like
15 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
17 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
18 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
21 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
23 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
24 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
25 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
27 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
28 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
29 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
31 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
33 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
34 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
35 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
36 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
37 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
38 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
39 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
40 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
43 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
44 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
45 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
46 same directory where system header files are kept.
48 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
50 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
51 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
52 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
53 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
54 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
55 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
57 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
58 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
59 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
60 it constitutes a separate package.
62 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
64 The typical error message might be like this:
66 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
68 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
69 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
70 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
71 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
72 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
73 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
74 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
76 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
77 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
79 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
82 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
83 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
84 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
86 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
88 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
89 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
92 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
94 An example of such an error is:
96 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
98 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
99 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
100 present in load-path:
102 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
104 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
105 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
108 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
110 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
112 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
113 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
115 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
116 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
117 /******************************************************************
119 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
126 + char* begin = NULL;
130 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
133 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
135 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
136 + if (begin != NULL) {
137 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
141 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
147 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
149 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
150 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
151 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
152 happens to exist on your X server).
154 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
156 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
157 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
158 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
160 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
161 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
163 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
164 a segmentation fault and core dump.
166 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
167 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
169 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
171 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
174 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
175 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
176 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
177 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
180 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
182 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
183 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
184 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
185 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
186 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
188 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
189 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
192 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
194 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
195 reported to prevent the crashes.
197 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
199 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
201 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
202 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
203 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
204 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
206 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
207 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
209 * General runtime problems
213 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
215 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
216 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
217 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
218 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
220 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
221 than the corresponding .el file.
223 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
225 These control the actions of Emacs.
226 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
227 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
230 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
231 of them, then try again.
233 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
235 The error message might be something like this:
237 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
239 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
240 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
241 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
244 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
246 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
247 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
248 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
250 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
251 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
252 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
253 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
257 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
259 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
260 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
261 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
262 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
263 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
264 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
266 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
267 them to two different keys.
269 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
271 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
272 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
273 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
275 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
276 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
278 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
279 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
280 another escape character in kermit. One user did
282 set escape-character 17
284 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
286 ** Mailers and other helper programs
288 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
290 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
291 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
292 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
293 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
294 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
297 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
299 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
300 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
301 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
303 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
304 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
305 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
306 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
307 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
308 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
309 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
311 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
312 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
313 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
314 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
319 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
320 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
321 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
322 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
328 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
329 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
330 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
331 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
332 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
333 directory copy is ineffective.
335 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
337 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
338 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
340 ** Problems with hostname resolution
342 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
343 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
344 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
345 *** GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
347 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
348 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
349 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
350 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
352 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
353 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
355 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
356 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
358 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
360 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
361 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
362 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
363 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
364 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
365 be careful not to lose the others.
367 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
369 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
371 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
372 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
375 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
377 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
379 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
380 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
381 calls for specifying this.
383 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
384 mail-host-address to the value you want.
388 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
391 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
392 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
393 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
394 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
395 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
396 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
398 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
399 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
400 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
403 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
404 call in the RFS server.
406 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
407 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
408 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
409 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
411 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
413 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
414 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
415 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
416 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
417 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
418 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
419 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
421 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
423 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
424 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
425 retrieving revision 1.2
426 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
427 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
428 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
432 * No return sent for close or fsync!
434 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
435 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
440 * No return sent for close or fsync!
442 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
443 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
449 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
450 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
451 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
453 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
455 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
456 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
457 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
458 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
459 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
460 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
461 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
463 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
464 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
465 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
468 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
469 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
470 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
471 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
473 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
474 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
475 + (insert-file-contents entity)
476 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
477 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
478 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
482 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
485 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
487 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
490 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
492 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
493 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
495 ** Miscellaneous problems
497 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
499 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
500 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
501 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
503 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
506 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
507 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
508 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
511 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
512 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
513 it only if it is undefined.
515 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
517 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
518 happen in a non-login shell.
520 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
522 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
523 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
524 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
525 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
528 if ($EMACS == "t") then
530 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
534 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
536 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
537 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
538 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
541 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
543 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
545 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
547 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
548 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
549 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
550 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
551 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
552 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
554 update-alternatives --config ftp
556 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
558 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
560 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
561 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
562 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
563 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
565 *** Dired is very slow.
567 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
568 time. Possible reasons for this include:
570 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
571 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
573 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
575 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
577 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
578 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
579 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
580 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
582 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
583 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
585 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
587 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
588 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
589 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
590 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
592 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
594 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
595 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
596 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
598 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
600 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
601 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
602 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
603 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
604 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
606 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
607 process invokes Emacs several times.
609 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
610 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
613 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
614 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
615 specified run-time search path in the executable.
617 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
618 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
619 backtraces like this:
622 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]
623 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
624 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
625 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
626 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
627 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
628 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
629 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
630 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
632 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
633 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
634 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
635 to work around the problem.
637 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
639 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
640 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
642 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
643 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
644 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
646 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
648 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
649 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
650 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
651 support for 8-bit characters.
653 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
654 this at your shell's prompt:
658 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
659 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
662 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
663 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
664 Then rebuild the speller.
666 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
667 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
669 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
670 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
671 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
672 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
673 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
675 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
676 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
677 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
678 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
680 * Runtime problems related to font handling
682 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
684 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
685 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
686 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
688 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
689 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
690 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
692 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
693 display all the characters Emacs supports.
695 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
696 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
697 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
698 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
699 of this character to display a space.
701 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
703 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
705 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
707 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
708 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
709 lines do not overlap.
711 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
713 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
714 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
715 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
718 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
719 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
721 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
722 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
723 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
725 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
727 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
728 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
729 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
730 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
731 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
732 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
733 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
734 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
735 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
736 to the end of a very large buffer.
738 Beginning with version 21.4, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
739 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
740 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
741 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
743 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
744 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
745 fontification by setting the variable
746 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
747 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
749 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
750 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
752 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
753 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
755 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
756 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
757 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
759 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
761 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
762 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
763 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
764 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
765 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
766 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
767 and then start the application again.
768 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
769 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
770 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
771 sufficient to recompile Qt.
773 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
775 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
776 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
777 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
778 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
780 A workaround for this is to add something like
782 emacs.waitForWM: false
784 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
785 frame's parameter list, like this:
787 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
789 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
791 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
793 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
794 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
795 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
796 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
799 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
800 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
803 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
805 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
806 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
807 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
808 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
809 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
811 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
812 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
814 * Internationalization problems
816 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
818 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
819 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
820 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
821 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
822 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
823 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
824 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
825 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
826 include in the fontset spec:
828 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
829 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
830 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
832 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
834 Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
835 points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
836 of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
838 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
839 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
840 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
841 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
842 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
843 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
846 To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
847 many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
848 be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
849 save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
850 japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
853 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
855 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
856 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
857 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
858 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
859 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
861 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
862 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
863 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
869 - (mucs-define-coding-system
870 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
871 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
872 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
874 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
875 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
876 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
877 + ;; system definitions.
878 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
879 + (mucs-define-coding-system
880 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
881 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
884 + (mucs-define-coding-system
885 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
886 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
887 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
891 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
893 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
894 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
896 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
898 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
899 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
900 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
901 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
902 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
903 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
905 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
907 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
909 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
912 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
913 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
916 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
918 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
919 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
920 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
921 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
922 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
924 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
926 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
927 (standard-display-european t)
928 That should be changed to
929 (standard-display-european 1 t)
933 ** X keyboard problems
935 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
937 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
938 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
939 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
940 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
942 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
944 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
946 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
947 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
948 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
950 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
952 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
954 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
956 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
957 for character composition.
959 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
961 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
962 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
963 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
964 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
967 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
968 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
970 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
972 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
973 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
974 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
975 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
978 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
980 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
981 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
982 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
984 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
985 directly with an X server.
987 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
988 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
989 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
990 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
991 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
992 have made the key binding correctly.
994 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
995 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
996 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
999 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1001 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1002 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1004 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1005 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1006 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1007 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1009 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1010 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1011 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1012 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1014 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1015 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1017 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1019 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1021 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1022 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1023 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1024 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1027 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1030 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1031 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1034 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1035 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1036 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1037 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1038 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1040 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1041 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1042 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1043 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1044 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1045 present or commented out:
1047 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1048 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1052 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1054 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1055 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1056 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1057 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1058 while, Emacs may print a message:
1060 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1062 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1063 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1065 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1067 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1068 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1069 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1070 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1072 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1073 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1074 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1077 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1078 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1079 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1080 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1081 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1082 used with neXtaw at run time.
1084 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1085 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1088 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1090 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1091 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1092 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1093 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1095 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1096 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1098 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1099 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1100 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1102 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1104 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1105 emulation for which it is set up.
1107 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1108 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1109 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1110 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1111 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1112 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1115 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1116 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1117 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1120 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1122 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1124 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1126 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1127 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1128 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1129 the resource prevents the problem.
1131 ** General X problems
1133 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1135 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1136 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1137 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1138 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1140 Here's how to do this:
1142 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1144 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1145 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1148 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1150 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1152 The messages might say something like this:
1154 Unable to load color "grey95"
1156 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1158 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1160 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1161 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1162 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1164 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1166 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1168 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1169 be carried out at the same time:
1171 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1172 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1173 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1174 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1177 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1178 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
1180 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1181 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1183 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1184 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1185 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1186 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1187 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1188 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
1189 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1190 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1191 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1192 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1193 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1195 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1197 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1198 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1201 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1203 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1205 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1206 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1208 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1210 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1211 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1212 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1215 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1216 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1217 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1218 workaround can be found.
1220 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1221 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1223 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1225 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1226 that isn't a color.)
1228 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1230 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1232 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1233 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1234 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1237 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1238 your font path, like this:
1240 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1242 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1244 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1246 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1248 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1249 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1250 want, rewrite the resource.
1252 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1253 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1254 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1256 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1257 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1259 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1260 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1263 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1265 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1266 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1267 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1269 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1270 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1272 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1274 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1275 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1276 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1277 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1279 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1280 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1281 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1283 The easy way to do this is to put
1285 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1287 in your site-init.el file.
1289 * Runtime problems on character termunals
1291 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1293 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1294 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1295 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1296 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1297 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1298 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1299 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1300 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1302 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1304 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1305 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1306 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1308 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1309 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1310 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1311 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1312 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1313 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1315 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1316 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1317 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1318 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1319 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1320 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1321 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1322 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1323 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1325 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1326 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1327 codes. You might as well try it.
1329 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1330 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1331 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1332 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1333 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1334 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1335 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1336 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1338 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1339 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1340 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1341 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1342 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1345 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1346 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1347 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1348 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1349 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1351 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1352 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1355 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1356 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1357 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1358 automatically. Here is an example:
1360 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1362 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1363 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1366 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1367 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1368 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1369 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1370 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1371 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1372 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1373 of inferior systems.
1375 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1377 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1378 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1379 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1380 that wants to use flow control.
1382 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1383 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1384 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1386 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1387 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1388 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1390 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1392 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1393 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1394 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1396 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1397 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1398 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1399 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1400 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1401 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1402 There are several possibilities:
1404 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1406 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1407 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1409 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1410 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1413 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1414 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1415 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1416 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1417 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1418 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1420 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1422 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1423 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1424 for certain terminals.
1426 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1427 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1429 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1430 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1432 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1434 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1435 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1436 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1437 control on the local system.
1439 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1440 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1441 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1442 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1444 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1445 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1446 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1448 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1449 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1450 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1451 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1453 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1455 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1458 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1460 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1461 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1462 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1463 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1464 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1465 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1467 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1468 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1469 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1470 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1471 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1472 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1473 time as the operations really take.
1475 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1476 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1477 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1478 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1479 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1480 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1481 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1482 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1483 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1484 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1486 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1487 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1488 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1489 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1490 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1491 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1494 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1495 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1496 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1498 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1499 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1501 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1503 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1506 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1507 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1508 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1509 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1510 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1513 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1514 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1515 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1516 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1517 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1518 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1520 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1521 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1522 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1523 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1525 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1527 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1528 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1529 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1530 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1531 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1532 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1533 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1536 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1537 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1538 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1539 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1540 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1541 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1542 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1545 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1546 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1547 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1548 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1550 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1551 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1552 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1553 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1556 Beginning with version 21.4, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1557 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1558 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1559 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1561 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1562 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1563 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1564 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1565 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1566 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1568 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1572 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1573 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1575 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1576 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1579 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1580 the Meta key stops working.
1582 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1583 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1584 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1585 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1586 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1587 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1588 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1590 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1591 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1592 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1593 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1594 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1597 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1599 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1600 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1602 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1604 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1605 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1606 keys can serve as Meta.
1608 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1609 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1611 *** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1613 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1614 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1616 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1617 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1618 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1619 networked and non-networked machines.
1621 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1623 **** Networked Case.
1625 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1626 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1627 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1631 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1637 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1638 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1639 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1640 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1642 **** Non-Networked Case.
1644 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1645 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1646 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1647 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1648 file is not necessary with this approach.
1650 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1652 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1653 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1654 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1655 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1656 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1657 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1658 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1661 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1662 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1663 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1664 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1665 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1666 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1668 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1669 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1670 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1671 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1673 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1674 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1676 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1678 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1679 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1680 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1681 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1683 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1687 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1689 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1690 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1691 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1692 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1694 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1695 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1696 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1697 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1699 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1701 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1702 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1703 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1707 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1708 directories that have the +t bit.
1710 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1711 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1712 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1713 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1715 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1716 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1718 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1720 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1721 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1722 current keymap to a file with the command
1724 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1726 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1727 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1728 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1731 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1733 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1735 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1739 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1741 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1743 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1744 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1745 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1746 but tty is giving it back 3.
1748 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1751 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1753 should be changed to:
1755 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1757 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1760 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1762 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1763 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1764 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1765 value is just ten seconds.
1767 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1769 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1770 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1772 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1773 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1774 configures the X server.
1776 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1777 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1778 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1783 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1785 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1786 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1789 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1790 Emacs built with Motif.
1792 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1793 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1795 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1797 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1798 rights, containing this text:
1800 --------------------------------
1801 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1802 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1803 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1808 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1810 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1811 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1813 --------------------------------
1815 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1817 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1821 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
1823 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1824 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
1826 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
1828 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
1830 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1831 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
1833 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
1835 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1836 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1837 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1838 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
1840 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
1842 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1843 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1844 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1845 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
1847 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1848 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1850 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1851 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1852 Definitions" to make them defined.
1856 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
1857 section on legacy systems.
1859 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
1861 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1862 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
1864 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
1866 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
1867 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
1868 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
1869 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
1871 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1873 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
1874 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1875 makes the problem stop:
1877 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1878 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1879 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1880 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1882 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1883 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1885 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1886 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1887 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1889 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
1891 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
1892 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
1894 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1895 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1897 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1899 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1901 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1902 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1904 You can fix this by editing the file:
1906 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1908 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1910 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1914 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1916 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1920 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
1922 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1924 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
1926 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1927 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1928 to allocate ptys reliably.
1930 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
1932 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
1934 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1935 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1938 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
1940 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
1941 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
1942 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
1943 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
1944 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
1945 pop-up menu interaction.
1947 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
1948 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
1950 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
1951 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
1952 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
1953 after moving back into it.
1955 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
1956 not as severely as in 21.1.
1958 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
1959 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
1961 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
1962 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
1964 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
1965 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
1966 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
1967 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
1968 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
1969 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
1970 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
1971 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
1972 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
1975 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
1976 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
1977 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
1980 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
1982 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1983 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1984 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1985 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1986 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
1988 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
1990 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
1991 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
1992 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
1993 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
1994 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
1996 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
1998 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
1999 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2000 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2001 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2002 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2005 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2006 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2007 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2008 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2009 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2010 client's executable. For example:
2012 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2014 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2015 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2017 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2019 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2021 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2022 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2024 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2025 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2026 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2027 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2030 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2031 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2032 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2033 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2035 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2037 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2038 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2039 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2040 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2042 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2043 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2044 or disable it entirely.
2046 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2048 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2049 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2050 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2051 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2052 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2053 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2054 generic mouse driver might help.
2056 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2058 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2059 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2060 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2061 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2063 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2064 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2065 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2068 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2069 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2071 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2073 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2074 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2075 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2076 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2077 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2078 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2080 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2082 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2083 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2084 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2085 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2087 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2088 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2089 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2091 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2092 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2093 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2096 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2097 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2098 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2101 * Build-time problems
2105 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2107 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2108 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2109 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2111 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2112 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2113 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2114 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2115 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2116 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2120 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2122 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2123 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2124 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2125 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2126 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2127 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2128 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2129 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2131 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2132 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2133 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2134 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2136 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2137 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2138 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2139 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2140 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2141 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2142 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2143 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2146 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2147 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2148 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2149 to work around the problem.
2151 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2152 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2153 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2154 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2156 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2158 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2160 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2162 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2163 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2164 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2165 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2166 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2167 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2168 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2169 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2172 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2173 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2174 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2175 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2176 run the script like this:
2178 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2180 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2183 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2184 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2186 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2187 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2189 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2190 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2191 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2194 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2196 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2197 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2198 Emacs's configure script.
2200 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2202 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2203 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2204 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2205 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2207 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2209 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2211 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2212 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2213 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2215 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2217 The error message might be something like this:
2219 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2220 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2221 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2225 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2226 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2227 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2228 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2231 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2232 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2233 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2234 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2237 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2239 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2240 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2241 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2243 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2244 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2248 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2250 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2252 #else /* debugging enabled */
2256 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2258 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2260 #else /* debugging enabled */
2265 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2266 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2268 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2269 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2270 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2271 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2272 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2275 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2279 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2280 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2282 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2284 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2285 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2289 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2290 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2292 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2293 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2294 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2296 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2297 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2300 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2304 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2307 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2309 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2311 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2313 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2315 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2316 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2318 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2320 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2322 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2324 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2325 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2326 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2327 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2328 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2330 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2334 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2336 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
2337 1 and 2), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2338 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper.
2340 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2341 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2342 workaround is known.
2344 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2346 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2348 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2349 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2350 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2352 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2354 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2355 execution of this command:
2357 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2359 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2360 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2361 command when running temacs like this:
2363 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2366 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2368 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2369 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2371 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2372 space available on the machine.
2374 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2375 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2376 for large blocks (many pages).
2378 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2379 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2380 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2381 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2383 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2384 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2385 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2387 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2388 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2389 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2390 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2391 when unpacking the shell archive.
2393 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2394 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2395 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2397 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2398 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2400 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2401 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2402 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2403 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2404 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2405 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2406 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2407 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2408 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2409 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2410 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2412 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2414 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2416 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2417 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2418 space than was allocated.
2420 This could be caused by
2421 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2422 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2423 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2424 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2425 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2426 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2428 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2429 (not from the directory you expected).
2430 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2431 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2432 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2433 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2436 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2437 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2439 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2440 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2443 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2445 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2446 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2448 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2450 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2451 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2452 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2453 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2455 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2456 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2457 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2458 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2459 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2460 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2461 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2464 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2465 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2466 know what's really going on here. */
2467 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2469 #if defined __linux__
2470 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2471 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2476 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2477 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2482 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2484 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2485 supplies the `install-info' command.
2489 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2491 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2492 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2493 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2494 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2496 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2498 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2499 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2501 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2503 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2505 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2506 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2507 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2508 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2510 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2511 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2512 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2513 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2514 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2518 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2520 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2521 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2522 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2523 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2525 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2527 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2529 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2530 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2531 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2533 ** Ancient operating systems
2535 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2537 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2539 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2540 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2542 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2543 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2544 X11Dev... with smit.
2546 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2548 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2550 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2551 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2552 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2553 treated as control characters.
2555 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2556 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2558 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2560 Could not load program emacs
2561 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2562 Error was: Exec format error
2566 Could not load program .emacs
2567 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2568 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2569 Error was: Exec format error
2571 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2572 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2574 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2576 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2577 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2581 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2583 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2584 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2585 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2586 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2587 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2589 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2590 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2592 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2596 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2598 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2599 ld: Undefined symbol
2600 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2601 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2603 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2605 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2606 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2608 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2610 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2611 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2612 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2613 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2614 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2615 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2616 obtain the destination address.
2618 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2619 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2620 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2621 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2622 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2623 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2624 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2626 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2627 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2628 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2629 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2630 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2632 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2633 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2635 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2637 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2638 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2639 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2641 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
2643 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
2644 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
2645 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2646 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
2648 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
2650 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2651 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2653 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2654 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2655 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2656 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2657 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2659 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2660 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2662 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2663 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
2665 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
2667 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2668 or link libXmu statically.
2670 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2672 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2673 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2674 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2675 communicating through pipes.
2679 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
2681 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2683 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2685 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2686 Here is how to make more of them.
2690 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2692 # creates eight new pty's
2696 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
2698 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2701 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
2703 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2704 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
2706 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
2708 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2709 003082 August 11, 1998.
2713 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
2715 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2718 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
2720 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2721 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2722 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
2724 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2726 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2727 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
2729 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2730 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
2734 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
2736 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2737 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2740 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
2742 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
2743 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
2744 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
2746 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
2748 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
2749 version of Solaris that you are using.
2751 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
2753 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2754 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2756 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2758 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
2760 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
2761 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
2762 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
2763 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
2764 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
2766 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
2767 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
2768 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
2771 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
2772 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
2773 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
2775 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
2776 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
2778 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
2779 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2781 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
2784 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2785 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2787 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2788 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2791 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2796 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2798 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2802 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2803 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2804 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2805 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2806 definition for your type of machine and system.
2808 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2809 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2810 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2812 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2813 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2814 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2817 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2819 #define ThreadedX YES
2821 #define ThreadedX NO
2822 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2823 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2824 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2826 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
2828 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2829 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2830 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2831 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2832 described in the Solaris FAQ
2833 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2834 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2836 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
2837 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
2838 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
2839 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
2840 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
2841 and the default CFLAGS.
2843 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
2845 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
2846 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
2847 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
2848 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
2849 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
2850 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
2851 are currently recommended for your host.
2853 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
2854 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
2855 105284-18 might fix it again.
2857 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
2859 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
2860 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
2861 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
2862 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
2864 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
2865 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
2866 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
2867 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
2870 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
2871 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
2874 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
2876 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
2877 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
2879 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
2881 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
2882 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
2885 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
2887 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
2889 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
2891 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2892 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2893 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2894 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2895 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2896 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2898 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
2900 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2902 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2903 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2904 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2907 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
2909 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
2910 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
2911 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
2912 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
2915 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2917 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2918 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2919 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2920 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2922 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2923 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2925 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2926 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2927 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2928 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2932 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2934 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2935 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2936 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2938 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2940 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2941 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2942 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2944 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2945 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2946 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2947 configure script) that reads:
2948 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2949 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2952 *** Irix 5 and earlier
2954 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
2955 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
2957 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2959 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2960 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2961 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2962 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2965 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
2967 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
2968 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
2969 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
2970 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
2973 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
2976 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
2978 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
2979 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
2980 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
2981 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
2984 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
2985 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
2986 on the network that can log on to the host.
2988 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
2989 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
2990 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
2993 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
2994 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
2995 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
2996 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
2998 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3000 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3001 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3003 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3005 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3006 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3007 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3009 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3011 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3013 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3015 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3016 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3017 fonts, so it does not work.
3019 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3020 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3021 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3022 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3023 resources affect Emacs also:
3025 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3026 *Background: scoBackground
3027 *Foreground: scoForeground
3029 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3030 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3032 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3033 Emacs*Background: white
3034 Emacs*Foreground: black
3036 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3037 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3038 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3039 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3040 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3041 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3042 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3043 Open Desktop display.
3045 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3046 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3048 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3050 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3051 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3052 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3053 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3056 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3058 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3059 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3060 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3061 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3062 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3063 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3065 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3066 But you have to be root to do it.
3068 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3070 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3071 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3072 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3073 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3074 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3076 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3077 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3081 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3083 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3084 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3085 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3087 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3088 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3090 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3093 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3095 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3097 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3098 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3100 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3101 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3104 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3105 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3106 communicate with the subprocess.
3108 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3109 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3110 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3113 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3117 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3118 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3125 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3133 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3138 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3139 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3146 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3154 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3158 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3160 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3161 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3163 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3165 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3166 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3167 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3168 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3170 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3172 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3173 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3174 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3175 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3180 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3182 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3183 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3184 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3185 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3186 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3188 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3191 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3192 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3193 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3194 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3196 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3198 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3200 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3201 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3202 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3203 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3204 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3205 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3206 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3207 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3208 your system works as before.
3210 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3212 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3213 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3214 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3215 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3216 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3218 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3219 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3220 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3221 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3223 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3224 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3225 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3226 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3227 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3229 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3230 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3231 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3233 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3234 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3235 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3237 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3239 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3241 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3242 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3243 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3245 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3246 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3247 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3248 incorrect library functions.
3250 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3251 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3253 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3254 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3255 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3256 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3258 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3259 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3262 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3263 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3264 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3265 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3266 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3267 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3268 explains this issue in more detail.
3270 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3271 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3272 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3273 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3274 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3275 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3278 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3280 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3282 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3283 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3284 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3285 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3286 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3288 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3290 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3292 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3293 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3295 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3297 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3299 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3301 This shell command should fix it:
3303 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3305 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3308 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3309 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3311 * Build problems on legacy systems
3313 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3315 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3316 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3319 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3320 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3322 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3323 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3325 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3327 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3329 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3331 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3332 were built for an older system version,
3334 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3336 made the problem go away.
3338 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3340 If you get errors such as
3342 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3343 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3344 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3346 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3347 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3348 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3349 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3350 ones available when you build Emacs.
3352 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3354 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3356 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3358 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3360 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3362 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3363 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3364 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3366 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3367 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3369 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3371 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3372 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3373 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3374 with a floating point option other than the default.
3376 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3377 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3378 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3379 floating point option: -fsoft.
3381 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3383 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3384 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3385 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3386 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3389 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3390 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3391 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3393 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3395 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3396 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3397 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3398 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3399 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3400 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3402 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3404 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3406 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3408 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3409 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3410 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3412 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3413 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3415 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3416 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3421 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3422 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3423 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3425 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3427 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3429 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3430 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3432 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3433 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3434 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3435 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3436 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3437 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3438 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3440 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3441 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3442 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3443 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3444 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3447 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3448 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3453 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3454 causes the problem to go away.
3455 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3456 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3458 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3460 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3461 These are some that have been observed.
3463 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3464 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3465 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3467 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3469 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3470 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3471 simpler expressions.
3473 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3475 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3476 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3478 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3483 test ((int *) arg.y);
3486 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3487 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3488 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3490 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3491 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3493 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3495 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3496 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3497 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3499 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3500 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3503 Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002,2004
3504 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3506 Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3507 are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3511 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3514 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a