[TxMt] How to freeze your TextMate

[Allan Odgaard]

On 29. Oct 2006, at 12:12, Nicolas Schmidt wrote:

> The proper behaviour would be that only the window from which the  
> command is run (multi-tasking ?) is affected.

Unfortunately it is not easy to block just a single window w/o  
bringing up a sheet (I did take an initial shot at this some time  
ago). It also doesn’t make a lot of difference for people who work  
with projects (since the other tabs will still be unavailable).

Ideally only the buffer should be “busy” and a progress indicator  
should appear after 5 seconds or so with an explicit “abort”  
button -- but that is also problematic for a few reasons (e.g. we do  
not want the progress indicator for commands which opens a UI, but TM  
can’t always spot it) and it’s a lot of work for something which  
until your letter hadn’t been described as “a problem with how  
TextMate deals with processes” nor that “It really should not be  
as prone to errors in external programs” -- most people know what  
being able to run shell commands from the buffer means, and the  
⌃C / ⌘. is generally enough to keep people from totally shooting  
themselves in the foot with this feature.

> I suppose that the subprocess spawned is synchronous (?!?).

I don’t know what “synchronous” refers to here. Since the result  
from the command is inserted into the document, the process is  
serial, yes, in that it needs to wait for the command to finish,  
before letting the user continue his work, just as if you ran a  
macro, inserted a snippet, etc.

> P.S.: I tried to kill the process with ^C , but TextMate didn't  
> seem to be able to terminate it. Instead it now became totally  
> unresponsive, so that I had to bring down TextMate itself.

The ‘yes’ command outputs around 20 MB/s on my machine, so if you  
had this running for just a few seconds before you killed it, you are  
in for a wait.