Mac – Individual terminal tabs running emacs become buggy/corrupted over time

bugemacsterminal

I generally work with a terminal window with a half-dozen tabs open, and that window lives for a week or so. Every once in a while, tabs (running emacs) become corrupted or something [every other line is missing, new text appears as blank spaces, first few lines are missing, etc] — where emacs no longer accurately displays what's in the file, and modifications don't appear correctly (while the files themselves always seem to be fine). Only individual tabs are effected, and I've only noticed problems in emacs. New tabs always work fine, so closing the tab and opening a new one effectively works-around the problem.

This has only happened since I upgraded to Mountain Lion.

Has anyone had similar problems?
I'm having trouble even coming up with directions or search-terms to try to investigate the problem; does anyone have any suggestions?

Best Answer

One way to keep emacs running stable for a long time is running it as a separate GUI app. I installed GNU Emacs for Mac OSX and it runs without any redraw issue. It will pick up your normal .emacs configuration and if you do not like the GUI elements like the toolbar you can hide them on startup in the variable default-frame-alist.

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