In scss-mode, Font Lock hangs on particular instances of Sass lists. To see an example of this, paste the following into a buffer, and activate scss-mode + font-lock-mode: $list: ( ('string', #000000, #fff) ('string', #000000, #fff) ('string', #000000, #fff) ('string', #000000, #fff) ('string', #000000, #fff) ('string', #000000, #fff) ); Font Lock hangs, and I find that I have to press C-g a number of times to be able to continue editing. In GNU Emacs 25.0.50.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.16.6) of 2015-08-10 on x240 Repository revision: a9bb9d8fc22417d1fafd8001d89a91c33c8b39ec Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11702000 System Description: Debian GNU/Linux testing (stretch) Configured features: XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG SOUND DBUS GSETTINGS NOTIFY LIBXML2 FREETYPE XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 Important settings: value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: SCSS