Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

geoff.greer.fm

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 239 posts

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#121

Post by mintplant »

Watabou wrote: post #103
winternewt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#124

Post by Artemis2 »

rootbear wrote: post #65

I assume portability is why the function declaration is old K&R style and not ANSI prototype style. I'm always surprised when I see K&R style in modern(ish) code. I do miss the ability to declare multiple parameters of the same type without repeating the type name, though. Oddly, several modern languages (like D) seem to think that's a feature.

> I do miss the ability to declare multiple parameters of the same type without repeating the type name

It's a feature Go has!

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#125

Post by inDigiNeous »

rando3826 wrote: post #75
stinos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Except when sometimes it does. That is, external factors reveal old bugs or introduce new ones. Like when you use it after installing a new package/driver/OS and it blows up. Or after years you give it to a new crazy user which somehow succeeds it hitting 20 keys at a time and your code doesn't handle that. I'm not saying occasions like those require…

aka bitrot

Bitrot means degradation of physical media containing digital data, not really anyting to do with bugs appearing in code that is introduced into a new environment.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#126

Post by jrbrtsn »

winternewt wrote: post #99
cpncrunch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me neither. I've been using vim for about 20 years and I don't think I've ever spotted a single bug in that time.

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.

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.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#127

Post by UberMouse »

eridius wrote: post #112
ggreer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the page as a companion piece to a blog post[1]. The code works, but it's quite buggy. Also, it is almost certainly broken on outdated OSes. It's just that nobody uses the latest Vim on IRIX or VMS, so no bug reports get filed. A quick glance shows some obvious errors in RealWaitForChar(). For example: with typical preprocessor defines, it uses gettimeofday() in a select() loop. This will break if the system c…

Your blog post recommends using NeoVim today. I've considered looking at it several times, but the home page[1] still says Is it ready to download and run now with all the features? No. Although some features are a work in progress, Neovim isn't at a stable point. Using Neovim should be done with caution as things may change. This warning is why I haven't yet tried switching over. Are they just being overly-cautious?…

I use Neovim as my daily editor, it definitely has it's quirks over Vim (sometimes it takes over 10 seconds to write to certain files, locking up Neovim and there are some bugs with the fuzzy finder I use that cause file corruption that aren't present in Vim) but on the whole it's pretty stable. Haven't encountered any issues yet that are more than a minor annoyance.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#128

Post by smegel »

joosters wrote: post #13

But the code works. It supports lots of platforms through choice. Yes, you could make the code prettier if you dropped some platforms. Yes, you could refactor it to use some abstracting libraries that now exist. But the code works . If you rewrote the code, the best result you could end up with is the same functionality that still works. All other possible results are bad. There is nothing to be gained.

> that still works...

And is more portable, maintainable etc. And criticizing code is not exactly the same thing as saying it should be re-written, given the time investment and low yield.

Yes the code works, but don't write code like this every again.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#129

Post by omaranto »

jrbrtsn wrote: post #126
winternewt wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Vim's 400 line function to wait for keyboard input

#130

Post by [deleted] »

kedean wrote: post #58
jandrese wrote: post #8

This is a classic case of why legacy code is a nightmare to maintain. It's the OpenSSL situation all over again, and one can definitely see the appeal of going through there and ripping out all of the functionality that nobody uses anymore just to make maintenance less of a nightmare. Luckily vim doesn't run suid root on any sane system, so all of this legacy cruft is not as huge of a threat surface on the machine.

It is still an issue, since vi/vim gets used for sudo purposes all the time. Any time someone uses visudo to modify their sudoers file, for example, that's giving root privileges to vim.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN