I have a bug when calling ediff3, the layout is not a balanced. Ultimately I found that combining this settings were the culprit : (setq window-combination-resize t even-window-sizes nil) ;; you can test it with eg : (setq default-directory "/home/user") (ediff3 ".bashrc" ".bash_history" ".bash_logout") Removing the manual resizing when splitting windows and relying rather on 'window-combinaison-resize' to balance the layout, solve the issue.