For years now I have been trying to track down a bug in dead key handling in emacs-gtk with UTF-8 locales. For the historically minded, the original netbsd-users thread starts at http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2010/11/03/msg007046.html while the subsequent discussion with the upstream maintainers is here: http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7380 Progress has been slow because upstream cannot reproduce the bug, and I have no experience of X11 programming. To recap, the problem I see is that dead keys, such as ` on the us-international keyboard, give me error messages like <dead-grave is undefined> instead of being combined with the following character. Poking around with gdb has so far revealed that XIM is somehow disabled on the emacs window, which consequently tries to use the latin1-only XLookupString API instead of the unicode-enabled XmbLookupString. The problem is specific to emacs: firefox, urxvt, and xterm handle dead keys correctly. I am running NetBSD/amd64 -current, with current pkgsrc. Possibly relevant environment variables: LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=C LC_NUMERIC=C I'm out of my depth, and would appreciate some help. 1- Can anyone else reproduce this bug? I'd like to find out if it is NetBSD specific, amd64-specific, configuration-specific ... If dead keys in emacs-gtk work for you and you use a UTF-8 locale, I would still like to hear from you. The more known-good configurations I know about, the better I can constrain the problem. 2- Are there any configuration files that should be present for XIM or other bits of xkb to work? 3- If anyone has some X11 programming expertise and a little time to spare, I could use some guidance. Thanks, -- IDL