Re: Macro problem

[John Mastro <john.b.mastro@gmail.com>]

Douglas Harter <dougharter@comcast.net> wrote:
> I sent this over the weekend The only response was suggesting that Windows
> was screwing with my .emacs, which didn't seem possible on 2 separate
> computers, and also because my .emacs didn't change.
>
> One of my applications has commands attached to the F6-F12 keys. A friend &
> I are having a problem with a macro made up of the F-keys. We had a macro
> created with the F3 macro F4 sequence. The Macro was F8 F10 F10 F8 F7. It
> executed fine for a few times then Emacs froze. I had to kill it. Running
> Windows 10 and Emacs 25.3. Executing that same series of keys manually gives
> us no problems.

It's likely that the problem is related to one or more of the commands,
so it's hard for people to offer much advice without knowing what
specific commands are being run (preferably with a sample buffer so they
can reproduce the freeze).

However, two very general ideas that come to mind are:

- Try running the macro from "emacs -Q" with only the minimal
  setup/configuraton to make the macro runnable. If this doesn't get
  stuck, it implies some package or configuration is contributing to the
  issue.

- If you have some familiarity with debuggers, run emacs under GDB and
  then use "kill -TSTP PID" when emacs gets stuck, which will allow GDB
  to kick in. Then you can get a backtrace and see what's happening.

Hope that helps

        John