vi alarm signals
Paul Fox
pgf at brightstareng.com
Wed Mar 12 13:12:27 UTC 2008
thinking about this some more -- given that hitting ^C has exactly
the same effect as this alarm going off, i can think of no reason
to keep it around at all. i will simply remove the code unless i
hear otherwise in the next couple of days.
paul
i wrote:
> it seems that vi contains a software watchdog of sorts.
>
> the intent is that if a vi command runs too long, a SIGALRM
> will be generated, and the result will be much as if the user
> hit ^C -- the operation will be aborted, and the editor will go
> back to waiting for input.
>
> now, i don't quite know why this was implemented, but:
> a) the current timeout is 3 seconds. this feels too short,
> especially when you're searching for a string in a long
> file.
> b) currently, the alarm signal isn't even caught, so when the
> timer expires, the editor just dies. there's a comment in
> the code that implies this wasn't always the case, so i
> assume it's a recent bug.
>
> what should i do?
>
> the obvious minimal change is simply to lengthen the timer, to
> something more reasonable than 3 seconds. the signal should also
> be caught correctly.
>
> but, should i simply delete this code? make it configurable? put
> it inside a developer-only ifdef of some sort?
>
> paul
=---------------------
paul fox, pgf at brightstareng.com
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