I have been using emacs-lucid as a server for a few months & encountered repeated sporadic annoyances. What follows is somewhat vague because I cannot give a precise repeatable sequence of operations which lead to the particular fault. Nevertheless, what I describe has occurred on far too instances. The machine is a Lenovo P15v Gen 1 with an i7 8c/16t CPU using Intel UHD graphics. I have Slackware-current on one partition & Fedore 34 on another. While this report is from the former, the
identical results happen on the Fedora machine. Furthermore, it makes
no difference whether it runs in console or xterm.
Launch emacs as a server. A buffer has a bash or elisp script with font-lock-mode enabled (syntax highlighting). It looks just fine. Then, I switch to another buffer & when I return, part of the file is not visible. Close inspection shows that only text encoded as strings is rendered black-on-black or white-on-white. Disabling font-lock-mode shows nothing is missing! Again enabling font-lock-mode & the same text is missing. Killing the buffer & reloading does not fix the problem. At this point opening any new bash or elisp file with strings is futile. The only way to correct all is a restart of the daemon! Of course, any setup of screens / consoles is lost. However, no data is ever lost or damaged.
Here is the general scenario
tty1> launch a server
emacs --daemon
or
emacs --fg-daemon
or
emacs M-x server mode
tty2> run Midnight Commander
mc
navigate -> .bashrc (for example)
emacsclient -t .bashrc
tty3>
mc
navigate -> file1
emacsclient -t file1
navigate -> file2
emacsclient -t file2
.
.
.
Initially everything behaves as expected in console & X. Then on time scales ranging from minutes to hours with the various emacsclients, randomly switching among tty's & killing / loading buffers, I eventually see that .bashrc is displayed with "missing" chars.
Attached are two screenshots (before & after failure) of my .bashrc from an xterm.
In GNU Emacs 27.2 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
of 2021-03-26 built on
p15v.rr.netSystem Description: Slackware 15.0 x86_64
Recent messages:
Loading smtpmail...done
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a.
Configured using:
'configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --mandir=/usr/man
--infodir=/usr/info --localstatedir=/var --with-x
--with-x-toolkit=lucid --with-mailutils --without-selinux --without-xim
--without-libsystemd --disable-acl 'CFLAGS=-O2 -fPIC''
Configured features:
XAW3D XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS GLIB NOTIFY
INOTIFY GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE HARFBUZZ XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS
LUCID X11 XDBE XIM MODULES THREADS PDUMPER LCMS2 GMP
Important settings:
value of $LC_COLLATE: C
value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix
Major mode: Dired by name
Minor modes in effect:
gpm-mouse-mode: t
show-paren-mode: t
tooltip-mode: t
global-eldoc-mode: t
mouse-wheel-mode: t
tool-bar-mode: t
menu-bar-mode: t
file-name-shadow-mode: t
global-font-lock-mode: t
font-lock-mode: t
blink-cursor-mode: t
auto-composition-mode: t
auto-encryption-mode: t
auto-compression-mode: t
buffer-read-only: t
column-number-mode: t
line-number-mode: t
transient-mark-mode: t
Load-path shadows:
None found.
Features:
(shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message rmc puny format-spec rfc822 mml
easymenu mml-sec epa epg epg-config gnus-util rmail rmail-loaddefs
text-property-search time-date mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse
rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader dired dired-loaddefs t-mouse
term/linux derived edmacro kmacro paren smtpmail auth-source cl-seq
eieio eieio-core cl-macs eieio-loaddefs cl-loaddefs cl-lib
password-cache json subr-x map seq byte-opt gv bytecomp byte-compile
cconv sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils
tooltip eldoc electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type
mwheel term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image
regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode elisp-mode
lisp-mode prog-mode register page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch
timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu
font-core term/tty-colors frame minibuffer cl-generic cham georgian
utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean
japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european
ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite charscript charprop
case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev obarray
cl-preloaded nadvice loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files
text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule
custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote threads dbusbind
inotify lcms2 dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting
x-toolkit x multi-tty make-network-process emacs)
Memory information:
((conses 16 53706 9734)
(symbols 48 6947 1)
(strings 32 18362 889)
(string-bytes 1 604547)
(vectors 16 9632)
(vector-slots 8 108586 7664)
(floats 8 20 299)
(intervals 56 375 0)
(buffers 1000 12))
emacsclient.0.jpg
emacsclient.1.jpg