emacs 25 choses fonts with different average width for 7x13 font, making bold text take more horizontal space. This is particularly a problem when using themes like https://github.com/bbatsov/zenburn-emacs which use bold to hihglight matching parenthesis in show-paren-mode, causing characters to shift as the cursor is moved from a parenthesis to a non-parenthesis character. Repro that demonstrates the problem in both 25 pretest 1 and current head (but is perfectly ok in emacs 24): $ emacs -Q --eval '(progn (set-face-font '\''default "7x13") (print (face-font "default")) (print (face-font "bold")))' shows -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-1 -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-80-iso8859-1 Notice the jump from 70 to 80 before the iso8859 component - that's the average width, and that's what I believe is causing bold characters to render wider than non-bold ones. Both are 70 in emacs 24. Below is the diagnostics output from M-x report-emacs-bug: In GNU Emacs 25.1.50.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) of 2016-02-22 built on alexk1 Repository revision: 81ef756e6aea369ec78f19b3609f01ceddc5851f Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11501000 System Description: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (upgraded from: Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS) Configured using: 'configure --with-x-toolkit=lucid' Configured features: XAW3D XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GCONF GSETTINGS NOTIFY GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE M17N_FLT LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS LUCID X11 Important settings: value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: Lisp Interaction Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t global-eldoc-mode: t electric-indent-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t Features: (shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message dired dired-loaddefs format-spec rfc822 mml easymenu mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg epg-config gnus-util rmail rmail-loaddefs mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils time-date mule-util tooltip eldoc electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type mwheel term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list newcomment elisp-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register page menu-bar rfn-eshadow timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax facemenu font-core term/tty-colors frame cl-generic cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese charscript case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev obarray minibuffer cl-preloaded nadvice loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote dbusbind inotify dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting x-toolkit x multi-tty make-network-process emacs)