From "emacs -Q" (but not with my normal font choices), the font used for the help-key-binding face is larger than the rest of the text, making various things kinda ugly. The normal text uses: ftcrhb:-DAMA-Ubuntu Mono-regular-normal-normal-*-45-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x55) The keyboard text is: ftcrhb:-PfEd-DejaVu Sans Mono-regular-normal-normal-*-45-*-*-*-m-0-iso10646-1 (#x52) And the help-key-binding face is: (defface help-key-binding '((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) [...] :inherit fixed-pitch) and (defface fixed-pitch '((t :family "Monospace")) "The basic fixed-pitch face." :group 'basic-faces) So this chooses a different font than (defface default '((t nil)) ; If this were nil, face-defface-spec would not be set. "Basic default face." :group 'basic-faces) ? Hm... but on the other hand, perhaps I started seeing this because I switched from Debian to Ubuntu? I'm seeing the same in Emacs 28 if I use the fixed-pitch face there (but in Emacs 28, help-key-binding doesn't inherit from fixed-pitch). So it's possibly that we've just never noticed before, because we haven't used `fixed-pitch' in these contexts before. In any case, it's unfortunate that it doesn't look very pleasant with "emacs -Q" in a major distribution like Ubuntu, so I think we should do something, but I'm not sure what. In GNU Emacs 29.0.50 (build 61, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.33, cairo version 1.16.0) of 2022-09-16 built on joga Repository revision: 7d39453fd64e355526291b0ca5672e838de5fb58 Repository branch: master Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12101003 System Description: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Configured using: 'configure -C' Configured features: ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ JPEG JSON LCMS2 LIBOTF LIBSELINUX LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 M17N_FLT MODULES NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER PNG RSVG SECCOMP SOUND THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS WEBP X11 XDBE XIM XINPUT2 XPM GTK3 ZLIB