I confirm this bug. To recreate this, it is important to note that you do not exit isearch in step 3. > 3. C-s m (to isearch for "m") From within isearch, do the below Step 4. > 4. M-s h r enter (to highlight "m" with the default face) And this is what I get: http://i.imgur.com/ZaLpzID.png Here is my emacs build info: Emacs version: GNU Emacs 25.0.90.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.23) of 2016-01-31, built using commit 43cb9f8ff378100ec31cb576faf347a87a05ba5d. ./configure options: --prefix=/home/kmodi/usr_local/apps/6/emacs/emacs-25 'CPPFLAGS=-fgnu89-inline -I/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include' 'CFLAGS=-ggdb3 -O0' 'CXXFLAGS=-ggdb3 -O0' 'LDFLAGS=-L/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib -L/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib64 -ggdb3' Features: XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GCONF GSETTINGS NOTIFY ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK2 X11