Hello I’m using the latest ubuntu with gnome 3. The below happened after a reboot and I have no idea why, or where to start to investigate. Any pointers? Any settings file to reset? Or font to config?
TRIED:
None helped, it looks the same
Which version of Sublime Merge are you using? Which version of Ubuntu? Does this happen after every reboot?
sublime-merge_build-1119_amd64.deb
I’m using Focal 20.04, which is not a GA version of Ubuntu, but every other program works well, including Sublime Text:
Reboots won’t help. Rebooted and updated the system already a few times from apt.
NB: This used to work, then it became like this after some time I used it, and I have no idea. That’s why I was trying to reset the configuration state.
Are you using display scaling of any kind? Can you also try reverting sublime-text?
If you move the .config/sublime-text-3 directory that will revert Sublime Text to a freshly installed state.
Yes, you nailed it. Reverting Sublime text triggered the issue (see the tab title!)
Actually now that I think about it, the previous screenshot did not show anything in the tab title, maybe the issue was there before too, and I didn’t notice.
I was actually trying to fix Sublime Merge 
I don’t have the faintest idea what it could be, I’ll try to reproduce on your distribution when I get the chance.
What do you have the font sans mapped to? That is what we use for tab names in Sublime Text and general interface text in Merge.
The fonts configured in my system can be seen in the screenshot I sent above “Sans Regular 12”. It’s a view from Gnome Tweaks (regular settings don’t let you see/control fonts)
I’m no expert in font config, so it isn’t clear to me that any of those set the “Sans” alias in font config.
Could you run this an paste the output?
fc-match -s sans
I think you hit the nail on the head with this. As you can see, the first of the list is a Emojii font I had to install to see emoji in Chrome. It’s totally wrong that it comes up as first choice for “sans”. Where is this declared?
$ fc-match -s sans |head
NotoColorEmoji.ttf: "Noto Color Emoji" "Regular"
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"
DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Bold"
UPDATE: I followed a crappy guide to fix emoji in chrome that instructed to have this file in place:
$ cd && cat .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
<fontconfig>
<match>
<test name="family">
<string>sans-serif</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
<string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
</edit>
</match>
<match>
<test name="family">
<string>serif</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
<string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
</edit>
</match>
<match>
<test name="family">
<string>Apple Color Emoji</string>
</test>
<edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
<string>Noto Color Emoji</string>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
which results in sans bein alias for the Emoji font (which is inintelligible). And breaking sublime-*.
Fixed with removing the file and calling:
fc-cache -f -v
Thank you @wbond, and others for the precious help, you rock! 