1

I just built Emacs 26.1 (stable) on Centos 6 (RHEL 6.9). When I fire up the executable with src/emacs -Q over X11 it shows an empty window with no minibuffer:

Failing Emacs 26.1

I built Emacs without gnutls, but that should be possible. Do I miss any essential libraries?

According to this question the issue might be related to the X-toolkit I'm using (GTK2). Does Emacs 26 not support GTK2?

The output of my ./configure --without-gnutls can be seen in this gist; the output of the make all in this.

Notes:

  1. The build runs fine in a terminal via src/emacs -Q -nw

  2. I have built Emacs 25 on the same machine and it runs successfully over X11.

Improve this question
3
  • Not an expert on this, but I'd try starting Emacs in GDB and looking for suspicious messages it might print during initialization.
    – wvxvw
    Commented Jun 29, 2018 at 8:23
  • Text inside the frame isn't drawn with any widget toolkit, and GTK2 widgets seem to show correctly. It's either a problem with double buffering introduced in 26 or freetype2.
    – user12563
    Commented Aug 7, 2018 at 15:50
  • @DoMiNeLa10 It is caused by double buffering. See the answer.
    – halloleo
    Commented Aug 8, 2018 at 1:28

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

Emacs 26 by default switches on double buffering for X servers when it finds the Xdbe header on the build machine. (See Emacs 26 release notes at the GitHub mirror.) Some X servers like MobaXTerm don’t support this.

So just switch off double buffering by adding '(inhibit-double-buffering . t) to your frame parameters. Safest way is to add it to default-frame-alist:

(setq default-frame-alist
      (append default-frame-alist '((inhibit-double-buffering . t))))

Credit: This tip comes originally from the bug-gnu-emacs list. (Thanks Eli and Robert!)

Improve this answer

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.