Emacs: (Almost) random crashes about 2-3 times a day on Mac OS X

Question

I am a happy Emacs user on Mac OS X for almost a year now. The problem is that I experience almost random crashes of Emacs several times. My setup is:

GNU Emacs 24.0.95.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36) [installed as Emacs-pretest-24.0.95-universal-10.6.8 from http://emacsformacosx.com/builds ] on Mac OS X 10.7.3. (The reason for Emacs 24 is because of the latest features in Gnus).

The main problem is of course that I can't track down the reasons why Emacs crashes. Sometimes it crashes when I capture a new event in org-mode, today it crashed when I added an attachment to an open email in Gnus per drag-and-drop -- both tasks I frequently do without problems. The only hint I found is http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-the-cause-of-an-Emacs-crash-on-OS-X so it seems I am not alone.

Assume Emacs crashed and I reopened it. If I double-click a file in Finder (to be opened in Emacs), the file doesn't open. I rather get a buffer showing a file I loaded at some previous point in time. If I double-click the file in Finder again, it is then opened. I have to do this for every new file I would like to open. The simple solution is that after a crash I open Emacs, close it normally, and open it again. It then runs fine -- until the next crash :-)

I know this is far too vague to be useful to ask (?), but I would like to know if this is a problem specific to my setup, specific to the Mac, or Emacs 24. So if anyone experiences similar crashes, it would be good to know. Two linux guys told me that they experience crashes about once a month, so I guess there is room for improvement :-)

Answer 1

I had the same problem and I could solve it by deleting all of the preference files regarding Emacs.

Answer 2

If it crashes, the problem is not in your config. The problem might be triggered by your config, but the problem is definitely in Emacs itself. So please report it with M-x report-emacs-bug so we can try and fix it.