Subject: bug#57449: 29.0.50; does not show "more Fonts" "By Family" when setting default font via menu "Options" --> "Set Default Font..."

From: Po Lu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2022 09:12:48 +0800

Gregor Zattler <[email-masked]> writes:

> Dear Emacs developers,
>
> for me on a very recent Emacs, compiled with
> --with-x-toolkit=no, it's not possible to set the default
> font via the menu:
>
> 1. emacs -Q
> 2. left-click on "Options" in menu bar
> 3. select "Set Default Font..."
> 4. select "More Fonts" (as a side note: The way the font sub
>    menus are presented mostly overlapping each other is
>    confusing to me)
> 5. left-click on "By Family"
> 6. now the mouse pointer changes from arrow to some circling
>    thingy which entertains me for round about 30 seconds
> 7. After no menu appears but the mouse pointer is now a much
>    smaller arrow and Emacs is unresponsive for another ~ 30
>    seconds.
> 8. now Emacs is responsive again, but there was no
>    possibility to change the default font.

I think the problem is that there are too many fonts installed on your
system.  Most menu libraries handle this situation noticeably badly,
since Emacs currently has no way to lazily specify the contents of a
menu.

The reason the oldXMenu is noticably worse off here, than, say, the
Lucid menu, is because it maps a separate window (known as "panes" in
the XMenu library) for each font family.  With hundreds of these
windows, the X server becomes noticeably slow, and the menu can be
dismissed after the panes load, if you click outside Emacs in
frustration.