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I have two boxes running Debian stable (trixie) with xfce4 as windows manager. I use various methods (unison, git) to synchronize most of these machine's state: home directories (including most dotfiles), /etc, installed packages, environment variables.

After the upgrade to trixie, I noticed that the default Emacs font size differs. (I believe that it did not before.)

I attach two screenshots created by

  • Starting emacs with emacs -Q --no-x-resources
  • Running the function describe-fontset (for the current frame)

As you can see, the default font size differs slightly. The sizes of the toolbar icons differ as well, and the third icon looks differently.

Any ideas about what could be the origin of this? It's very strange since

  • The Emacs packages are identical (from Debian stable).
  • Any local configuration and X resources are ignored per command line option.
  • The same fonts are available on both machines.

Any ideas?

The two screenshots, superimposed

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  • The only difference I can see is the menu items at the top: everything else looks the same. Is that what you are talking about? If so, you need to check the settings for the desktop environment. I don't think Emacs controls that - at least, it does not in my setup (Gnome Shell 48.4 on Fedora 41). Commented Sep 27 at 2:54
  • There is also that ...-13... vs ...-15-... difference, but I find it very hard to see what difference (if any) this causes (but my eyesight is not good and I haven't spent any effort or time to try to get a more controlled experiment in place). Commented Sep 27 at 16:13
  • The two images had different widths in pixels, but stackexchange displayed them scaled to the same width, which made the difference hard to see. I have now combined both screenshots into one image. Commented Sep 30 at 15:37
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    I’m voting to close this question because this is most probably an Xfce bug - nothing to do with Emacs. Commented Oct 2 at 15:23

1 Answer 1

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The problem was due to an obscure config file inconsistency between xfce4 versions!

The default font size used by Emacs is provided by the window manager (probably by some freedesktop mechanism). Now both boxes were showing exactly the same xfce4 setting: under Settings/Appearance/Fonts

  • the “Default Font” was shown as “Sans Regular 10”,
  • the “Default Monospace Font” as “Monospace Regular 10”.

Trying to debug the problem on the box with the too large characters, I decreased both font sizes to 9 in xfce settings. This resulted in Emacs using a smaller font: the size shown in Emacs by C-u x = went down from 15 to 12. I then opened xfce settings again, and increased the font sizes back to 10. To my surprise, the size shown in the font string now went up to 13, i.e. the same as on the other machine! (Note that the xfce fonts dialog was showing exactly the same values as before, when the sizes were off.)

Trying to understand what happened, I diffed yesterday’s snapshot of ~/.config/xfce with the current state and this is the result:

diff -u '--color=auto' -r .config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml /home/cwg/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml --- .config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml 2025-09-26 17:36:30.755578811 +0200 +++ /home/cwg/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml 2025-09-30 17:41:11.755446766 +0200 @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ <property name="CanChangeAccels" type="bool" value="true"/> <property name="ColorPalette" type="string" value="black:white:gray50:red:purple:blue:light blue:green:yellow:orange:lavender:brown:goldenrod4:dodger blue:pink:light green:gray10:gray30:gray75:gray90"/> <property name="FontName" type="string" value="Sans 10"/> - <property name="MonospaceFontName" type="empty"/> + <property name="MonospaceFontName" type="string" value="Monospace 10"/> <property name="IconSizes" type="string" value=""/> <property name="KeyThemeName" type="string" value="Emacs"/> <property name="MenuImages" type="bool" value="true"/>

As one can see, previously the property MonospaceFontName was unset, and now it has the value Monospace 10.

This is probably a (very minor) xfce bug. I might report it, but will first wait a bit for any comments here.

Long live btrfs snapshots!

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  • Please report it! Commented Oct 2 at 15:17

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