Emacs Client Crashes due to not finding font (but regular emacs works fine) - NixOS

User Support
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#1

What happened?

I installed the Monoid font (or font-family, whatever) and turned on NixOS’s option to create a font directory under /run/current-system/sw/share/X11/fonts.

This worked at first, but now the screen just flashes white when I try to run emacsclient. Strangely, it still works with just launching emacs. I assume there is some weirdness with what environment variables the client inherits versus full-fat emacs. I haven’t restarted my emacs daemon yet because I am using a NixOS option to run the emacs server by default, so I would need to restart my computer. Will do that after posting.

I have only customised a few keybindings and configured the init.el file Doom ships with.

By the way, I am completely new to emacs, other than using Doom for a short while on my old Fedora (really Nobara) install (until it broke my hybrid graphics after an update, and wouldn’t even boot to tty), and I really liked it.

I only installed NixOS on Saturday. So to summarise, I don’t know emacs well at all and I don’t really understand Nix that well (I understand the language mostly, but how the OS works is another kettle of fish).

(Btw, couldn’t get vterm to work either, so I just used eshell instead.)

Emacsclient output

$ emacsclient -c
Waiting for Emacs...
*ERROR*: Font not available: #<font-spec nil nil Nerd\ Font\ Propo nil nil nil nil nil 16 nil nil nil nil>

System information


Loading data dump...
#2

Update:

Restarting the computer (and thus the emacs server daemon) fixed the issue. I assume the daemon lived on from some earlier configuration state when I was trying to work out how to let emacs see the fonts (this is done with fonts.fontDir.enable in my configuration.nix), or perhaps when I was trying to work out what :family to use (“Monoid Nerd Font”).

Still no sure why it worked for a while before breaking again, but all’s well that ends well.

I wrote this to record it for others who might run into similar font issues between NixOS and emacs.

#3

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