Annoying hangup with "man"

Annoying hangup with "man"

[David Karr]

I'm using GNU emacs v28.2 on Cygwin 3.4.6-1.x86_64.

For quite a while now, I've been running into a very annoying bug with the
"man" package.  When I execute "man", if I type the item I want info on too
quickly, it hangs Emacs completely, and I have to kill it and restart it,
losing anything I was working on.  If I'm careful and type slowly, it
doesn't hang. This often happens after only entering one or two characters.

It appears that it hangs at about the character where it would start to
provide completion proposals, but I've seen it happen before that. Today
I'm testing it with "curl". I saw it hang after entering "cu", but then
after a restart, it happened after just "c". If I just put my hands down
after the prompt appears and wait a second or two, I see the completion
proposals appear after "cu".

Re: Annoying hangup with "man"

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Karr <davidmichaelkarr@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2024 12:47:05 -0800
> 
> I'm using GNU emacs v28.2 on Cygwin 3.4.6-1.x86_64.
> 
> For quite a while now, I've been running into a very annoying bug with the
> "man" package.  When I execute "man", if I type the item I want info on too
> quickly, it hangs Emacs completely, and I have to kill it and restart it,
> losing anything I was working on.  If I'm careful and type slowly, it
> doesn't hang. This often happens after only entering one or two characters.
> 
> It appears that it hangs at about the character where it would start to
> provide completion proposals, but I've seen it happen before that. Today
> I'm testing it with "curl". I saw it hang after entering "cu", but then
> after a restart, it happened after just "c". If I just put my hands down
> after the prompt appears and wait a second or two, I see the completion
> proposals appear after "cu".

Emacs 28 is no longer maintained.

I suggest to try Emacs 29 (v29.2 was just released), and if the
problem still persists there, report this as a bug together with all
the details necessary for reproducing the problem.  (My suggestion is
to base the recipe on a man page that has wider availability than that
of curl, though; so simple shell command like 'ls', perhaps.)

Re: Annoying hangup with "man"

[tpeplt]

David Karr <davidmichaelkarr@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm using GNU emacs v28.2 on Cygwin 3.4.6-1.x86_64.
>
> For quite a while now, I've been running into a very annoying bug with the
> "man" package.  When I execute "man", if I type the item I want info on too
> quickly, it hangs Emacs completely, and I have to kill it and restart it,
> losing anything I was working on.  If I'm careful and type slowly, it
> doesn't hang. This often happens after only entering one or two characters.
>

There are two features of Emacs that every Emacs user should learn to
use so that the problem of "losing anything I was working on" does not
occur:

1. Emacs auto-save and recover.  When you restart Emacs, you should be
able to recover most or all of your lost work by using the
‘recover-session’ command.  This is documented in the ‘Recover’
sub-section of the ‘Auto Save’ section of the ‘Files’ chapter of the
Emacs user manual.  To read the ‘Auto Save’ section from the beginning,
you can type M-: (that is, your meta key followed by the colon key,
‘:’), and then type the following text after the ‘Eval:’ prompt:

   (info "(emacs) Auto Save")


2. Emacs desktops.  Emacs users can divide their work into sessions
(groups of files and buffers) called ‘desktops’.  These can be loaded
and switched among depending on need.  Once set up, these desktops will
automatically keep track of a set of files and buffers so that it is not
necessary for an Emacs user to open or restore the set manually using
multiple commands.  Instead, loading a ‘desktop’ will cause Emacs to
restore them for the user.  How to set up Emacs to use the ‘desktop’
feature is documented in the Emacs user manual.

  M-: (info "(emacs) Saving Emacs Sessions")

Note that it is possible to have any number of desktops and to switch
among them in a single Emacs session.  This supports working on multiple
projects and then switching among them even if many days, weeks, months,
or years have passed since you last worked on a given project (assumes
that the .emacs.desktop file for a given project has not become
incompatible with the ‘desktop’ library).

--