Emacs auto-complete popup menu broken

Question

I'm have reinstalled my emacs and now I'm using emacs v24.3.50 with auto-complete v1.4 and popup.el v0.5. Unfortunately the popup "menu" of auto-complete is kinda broken (see attached screenshot).
The different items are not aligned along a commong vertical line [ignore the black overlay, that stems from CEDET and is probably meant to be placed on the right side next to the popup menu; the problem remains when disabling CEDET, so it is not related).

From what I can tell it looks like the extent of this "shift" between lines depends on how much the length of the strings differs. Also, when selecting a different suggestion using the arrow keys the horizontal shift of the lines changes a little (~few pixels) each time the mark is moved one line up/down.

I have uploaded the part of my .emacs.d/init.el that is used for configuring auto-complete here.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Answer 1

It appears you are using a proportional font, which breaks the calculation of the left edge of the overlay.

You can try changing the way auto-complete computes the column:

(setq popup-use-optimized-column-computation nil)

You can also change to a fixed width font.

Note that some other completion systems for Emacs can use tooltips instead of overlays, which would avoid this problem.