I compiled Emacs from CVS yesterday, badly breaking it in X11. It would die horribly in a segmentation fault whenever I started it in graphical mode, even if I specified -q —no-site-file to make it skip all the configuration files. It worked just fine in console mode (-nw), but I happen to like being able to see images and different fonts in my Emacs, so that was a no go.

For a moment, I was worried that Emacs had finally outgrown my computer’s memory capacity. A little searching and some help on #emacs suggested that the problem might lie with fontconfig. I had removed a number of font packages in order to free up enough space for a system upgrade. Maybe that was the reason why Emacs was crashing on me! I tested it with this command:

emacs -q --no-site-file -fn '-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

and Emacs loaded. Whee! I added the following to my ~/.Xdefaults to
make this happen automatically whenever I start Emacs.

Emacs*font: -misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Life is back to normal.

Random Emacs symbol: planner-low-priority-task-face – Face: Face for low-priority tasks.