On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 04:10:37PM -0600, Tom Browder wrote: > I have a new laptop running Buster (with the MATE desktop) and noticed my > Emacs highlighted text was not showing any differently than non-highlighted > text. After some conversation on the #emacs IRC channel, it was suggested I > run this in a terminal window and restart Emacs: > > $ xrdb /dev/null Yikes. Like hitting your TV set with a wrench ;-) > Lo and behold Emacs highlighting worked again! I'm not very much into how MATE manages your resources [1], but it sems that some resources for your Emacs are broken. Typically, at start, resources come from ~/.Xresources or ~/.Xdefaults (you stated that the first one in your case was empty). For system-wide resources, there are usually files under /etc/X11/Xresources, typically one file per application. You can have a look into the content of your X resource database with xrdb -query (of course before whacking the database with /dev/null ;-) Perhaps you can recognize the problematic entries and find out whence they are set. Cheers [1] I'm under the impression that "modern" desktop environments hate X, but I might be wrong. -- tomás
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