gvim fails to start, says "no fontset found"

Question

When I try to start gVim in my RHEL, I get the following message:

Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion Warning: Unable to load any usable fontset Error: Aborting: no fontset found

E852: The child process failed to start the GUI Press ENTER or type command to continue

And the the VIM starts up.

Answer 1

:h E852 When starting the GUI fails Vim will try to continue running in the terminal.

So there is an issue with the fonts that is causing gvim to fail to start.

What does locale return?

This error can occur if you are using a utf-8 locale but do not have any utf-8 fonts installed, the solution being to install some fonts.

RHEL fonts

6.1. Adding new fonts for a user To add fonts for an individual user, copy the new fonts into the ~/.fonts/ directory in the user's home directory. Use the fc-cache command to update the font information cache, as in the following example:

fc-cache ~/.fonts

Answer 2

Usually it's because it's a pure x11 version of gvim, adding at least gtk support allows it to access fontconfig and then it works much better... (I had the problem here just now, and my solution was adding gtk support).