To reproduce, save the attachment as `font-lock-hangs.el' and execute: $ emacs -Q -l font-lock-hangs.el C-g doesn't help anymore. The only thing you can do is to kill and start Emacs anew. Git commit fd1ee05977. To quote a discussion from another bug, the reply is from Eli Zaretski: > > By the way, it would really be nice if Emacs could do something about hangs irrespective of what causes > > that. Even if Elisp code is buggy, Emacs itself should never allow it to fall into an infinite loop and stop > > responding to C-g, leaving full restart as the only way out. > > I think that's impossible in general, unless we restrict what Lisp > programs can do. Every programming language can be used to write a > buggy program. > > However, it should be possible to prevent some cases of such > problematic behavior, certainly so when the infloop is caused by our > bug. But for that we need to know the details of the specific case in > order to investigate. Paul