I have in my .emacs file only these two lines: (custom-set-variables '(font-lock-keywords-case-fold-search t)) Then if I visit an empty or nonexistent C file and just type "LONG" (in all caps or with at least one letter being capital), Emacs will hang after typing the final G but before the G appears on screen. Typing C-g a couple of times gets Emacs unstuck until I continue to type. The same behavior also happens if I type "SHORT". This happens in both Emacs 26.1 in text mode on a Linux machine and in Emacs 25.3 in GUI mode on Windows. After messing with GDB a bit, I am pretty sure the hang is at the while loop in c-forward-type at cc-engine.el:7657 and its getting stuck because looking-at matches LONG because its case insensitive, but the c-forward-keyword-clause doesn't move forward because the first thing it does is try to find "LONG" in c-keywords-obarray via `intern-soft` and immediately returns because it doesn't find it there. Here is the while loop: (while (progn (setq safe-pos (point)) (looking-at c-opt-type-component-key)) (when (and c-record-type-identifiers (looking-at c-primitive-type-key)) (c-record-type-id (cons (match-beginning 1) (match-end 1)))) (c-forward-keyword-clause 1))