Posted October 5th 2016
Emacs and mutt started spewing warnings in my xterms a month or two ago. They look like this:
(emacs:7719): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkWindow 0xd32290 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen. (emacs:7719): Gtk-WARNING **: GtkWindow 0xd32290 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen. (emacs:7719): Gtk-WARNING **: EmacsFixed 0xd36130 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen. (emacs:7719): Gtk-WARNING **: EmacsFixed 0xd36130 is drawn without a current allocation. This should not happen.
The warnings annoy me. They're not relevant to what I'm doing; they're a GTK problem or an emacs problem. I silenced the warnings by adding this to my .bashrc:
# 2016-10. GTK has an annoying new warning which causes emacs and lots
# of other X program to spew things like "GtkWindow 0xd34290 is drawn..."
# on stderr. So we have this function which redirects emacs and mutt stderr
# to /dev/null
#
# We can remove this when GTK disable the warning again, which will
# probably happen by 2017-06.
emacs()
{
/usr/bin/emacs $* 2>/dev/null
}
mutt()
{
/usr/bin/mutt $* 2>/dev/null
}
This lets me type 'emacs myfile.txt' and get an emacs started which doesn't dump rubbish in my terminal.
(I could have used an alias for 'mutt', since I pretty much always run mutt without arguments. But for 'emacs' I had to use a function because I want the arguments passed.)
FWIW, here's the commit that made GTK dump debugging information to stderr by default. And here's the commit which fixed it again.
Edit 2016-11-21: underlying problem is now fixed in Debian testing, so the above workaround is no longer needed.