Re: Keyboard goes dead

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Ken Goldman <kgold@watson.ibm.com> writes:

> On 02/05/2011 05:43 PM, Tim X wrote:
>> Ken Goldman<kgold@watson.ibm.com>  writes:
>>
>>> 23.1.1 on Linux x86, 64bit
>>>
>>> Has anyone seen this:
>>>
>>> About once a day, the keyboard becomes inactive within emacs.  The mouse works,
>>> and the keyboard works outside emacs.
>>>
>>> It seems to happen right after I do a grep or compile and try to do a
>>> next-error.
>>>
>>> Sometimes, I can recover by hitting return in the compile or grep window.  When
>>> I do that, the messages window appears, and anything that I typed in the other
>>> windows is processed.
>>>
>>> Other times, I have to kill emacs.
>>>
>>> Ctrl-G doesn't have any effect, nor does ESC-ESC-ESC.
>>>
>>> Any clues?  Anything to try?
>>>
>>>
>>
>> No cannot think of what it might be and I don't see this behavior.
>> However, you could try enabling "enter debugger on quit" in the options
>> menu and see if hitting C-g gies you a backtrace next time this occurs -
>> may narrow down the possible cause or give you something to work with.
>
> I did as you recommended, but it didn't help.  C-g didn't enter the debugger.
> I assume that's because emacs isn't processing the C-g or any other keyboard
> character.
>

Not really. If I had to guess, I'd be suspicious that what is really
happening is that emacs is caught up in some slow process and not
responding to keyborad input (maybe see if your load increases when this
next happens). 

The most relevant suggestion I could give is to upgrade. Emacs 23.1 is
quite old. Emacs 23.2 has been out for some time and emacs 23.3 is
scheduled to be released soon. It could well be your fighting a bug
which has already been fixed in a later version. 

I'm running emacs 24.0.50 most of the time and most of the day I'm using
it. I've not noticed this behavior (also running 64 bit). I sometimes
run emacs 23, but I use the latest dev branch (i.e. what will be 23.3). 

The only other thing which *might* provide some more details would be to
run emacs under gdb and see if you can use gdb to get more information
on what emacs is doing when it stops responding to keyboard events.
Never needed to do this myself, so cannot provide any specific details.
Might find something relevant on the emacs wiki at http://emacswiki.org

Tim


-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au