Redisplay problems?

[Christian Lynbech]

Are there any known redisplay issues or is the redisplay machinery
undergoing some transformations currently?

I am using the latest version of emacs 24 from the repository, I have
just updated and rebuilt today and I am seeing some strange and rather
annoying problems.

I will try to explain what I am seeing, let me know if it is to
incoherent to make sense, I can lok into creating a video or something.

My problem essential is that I seem to lose the cursor upon startup (as
it becoming invisible, I still have a welldefined point where
charactyers are inserted, but I cannot see the cursor itself). I have a
rather involved .emacs, built up over many years, using a multiframe
setup. Basically, during startup I load and configure a bunch of stuff
and open a couple of predefined frames which are closed again, leaving
just one frame open. When .emacs evaluation is finshed and I look at my
open frame, it has no cursor. Typing C-l doesn't help, the cursor
remains invisible. If I then switch to one of my other frames, the
cursor reappears in the initial frame, but if I continue to de-iconify
other frames, they too has an invisble cursor. Switching between now no
longer helps, so I need to delete those frames and recreate them. Once
they have a visible cursor, it seems to stay visible. Starting up with
-q (or --daemon) seems to avert the issue, so I do not have any easy way
of reproducing it.

My theory is that something topples due to these frames being creating
during initialization (.emacs evaluation) and C-l for some reason either
doesn't work as reliably as it once did or something optimizes away some
redisplay that I need.

I am unsure exactly when this behaviour has started, sometime last year
(2013). At first I thought it was just related to me running on a rather
old RedHat Linux server installation, but now all my installations on
both Linux and Mac OSX are affected. I do not use gnome and compile with
the lucid toolkit.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

I think I shall be able to rewrite my startup to code around the issue
(at least if the time of creating the frames somehow is involved) but I
wanted to raise the issue before just burying it. I know the above
description is in itself not usefull for debugging the problem, let me
know if there is any other information I can provide or if you want to
pursue it at all.


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Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - address@hidden (Michael A. Petonic)