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Comment by winternewt | Hacker News Reader

vim crashes or hangs for me about once every month. I've never bothered to find out why since I don't think it's worth the effort. The effort would be lower if the code was cleaner and didn't have so much bloat related to platforms that don't exist. It would definitely be easier to submit a patch if I didn't need to cater to all the platforms I've never seen.

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Most likely you've typed Ctrl-S, which causes the terminal to pause. Here is the what the vim docs have to say about that:

Note: CTRL-S does not work on all terminals and might block further input, use CTRL-Q to get going again.

I've never heard of Ctrl-S causing a crash, though. So your explanation at most accounts for the hangs.

I've used vim pretty much every work day in the last 15 years or so, and I can count the number of times it's crashed on one hand. If you can actually verify that it crashed (i.e. core dump file), then you've got the source available, and you can send in the patch.

It's never crashed on me. I'm not the person who claimed it crashed.

This was my biggest hurdle to learning vim, I kept hitting Ctrl-S...

This might help:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_Ctrl-S_to_save_current_or_new_...

(Caveat emptor, can't speak from first hand experience.)

If you run "stty -ixon", it will prevent Ctrl-S from pausing the terminal. I understand that feature in the days of slow connections, but it feels rather silly at this point.

I use it to pause output from a running batch job (e.g. deployment).

That is fascinating to me, in a train-wreck sort of way.

We had a discussion a few days ago about the ways in which some interfaces (command line in particular) can be user-hostile. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831429) Vim's Ctrl-S appears to be a function, keyboard-adjacent to several commonly-used functions, whose main effect for many users is "cause the program to fail immediately with no indication of how to fix it." I don't think I could make up a better example of user-hostile design if I tried.

It is not "Vim's Ctrl-S"; it's the terminal emulator's ctrl-s. Same thing happens in less, for example.

Ah, my mistake. Same criticism applies, though; possibly more so, as a terminal emulator running within a GUI would find it even easier to display a useful status message or similar.

Are you sure the crashes aren't caused by a plugin you installed?

I have only experienced a handful of vim crashes but all of them were caused by plugins.

vim may still be partly to blame in that case, as it lacks support for async plugins.

Do you also blame Microsoft Word because it doesn't let you play movies?

People have tried to add async plugin support to vim, but the patches have all been rejected. Meanwhile, the plugin support in Neovim is worlds better.

Microsoft Word doesn't even accept patches, which I do indeed hold against it.

The patches were rejected because they didn't provide a working solution for cross platform support. The plugin system in Neovim is only "better" for people who actually want async plugins. I am not one of them.

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