Re: Emacs exited with message “X protocol error: BadPixmap”

[Richard Stallman]

    Anyways, I've seen on Windoze that if Emacs crashes, Visual Studio
    kicks in and offers you to debug the crashed process.

    Can't Emacs be taught to do something similar by hooking various
    signal handlers (SIGSEGV, SIGILL, etc) to a function that launches GDB
    with command line parameters that attaches it to the (crashed) Emacs
    runtime?  That way, GDB is only started _if_ Emacs crashes.

I don't know.  I think it is possible to attach with GDB to an existing
process.  But I am not sure whether you can make a process hang around
for inspection if it tries to crash.