emacs doesn't show letters in RHEL6.6

emacs doesn't show letters in RHEL6.6

[peter.lingsberg]

I'm using RHEL6.6 but emacs is behaving very strange. Letters disappear (doesn't show) while I write or scroll. I have to do Ctrl-L to refresh to see the letters. Extremely annoying and I can hardly use emacs anymore. Version on emacs is 1:23.1-25.el6. I downloaded a newer emacs and compiled it, but the problem persists. Could it have something to do with X or gdm?

I have been running RHEL6.4 for a couple of years and had no problem with emacs there.

Snapshot of how it looks when I write or just move around with the cursor. Note that all spaces actually have chars:

http://ladda-upp.se/files/2016/b177214.jpg

If I then reload page with Ctrl-L, the window looks like this. The characters are suddenly visible. 

http://ladda-upp.se/files/2016/b177216.jpg

But as soon as I start write or move cursor, the characters will be invisible again.

emacs -q, emacs -Q or changing fonts won't help. What to do??? I love emacs but I can't use it when it behaves like this...

I run RHEL6.6 out-of-the-box as a virtual machine in VMware. It is exactly the same environment as I had in RHEL6.4 and there were no problems with emacs there

Re: emacs doesn't show letters in RHEL6.6

[Javier]

> I'm using RHEL6.6 but emacs is behaving very strange. Letters
> disappear (doesn't show) while I write or scroll. I have to do
> Ctrl-L to refresh to see the letters. Extremely annoying and I can
> hardly use emacs anymore. Version on emacs is 1:23.1-25.el6. I
> downloaded a newer emacs and compiled it, but the problem
> persists. Could it have something to do with X or gdm?

As a first guess I would put the blame on gtk.

Try to compile emacs again, but this time with the lucid toolkit.

./configure --with-x-toolkit=lucid  ; make ; make install

In most distros you don't need to compile since there is an
emacs24-lucid or emacs-lucid package, but since you are on RHEL
you may need to compile it yourself.

If that doesn't work try emacs -nw on the terminal, to see
if it displays letters ok.

Re: emacs doesn't show letters in RHEL6.6

[peter.lingsberg]

I compiled with lucid but the problem persists.
Running emacs -nw on the terminal is OK though, all letters are shown.
Any other ideas on how to be able to run emacs in its own window?

Re: emacs doesn't show letters in RHEL6.6

[Javier]

peter.lingsberg@gmail.com wrote:
> I compiled with lucid but the problem persists.
> Running emacs -nw on the terminal is OK though, all letters are shown.
> Any other ideas on how to be able to run emacs in its own window?

Try to run it with a simple bitmap font.  Also disable the localization.

LC_ALL=C  /usr/bin/emacs -Q -fn 7x14
LC_ALL=C  /usr/bin/emacs -Q -fn 10x20