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So I have a long papers.bib bibtex file that I edit with emacs (spacemacs bibtex layer), but the syntax highlighting only ever goes about halfway down. Here it is at about line 790:

screenshot

Other times this happens elsewhere: line 10,000, line 900, etc. At first I thought this happens because of some incorrect syntax in the Bibtex, but I can't see any errors, actually. What's going on here, and how can I get it to syntax highlight the whole file?

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  • This used to happen to me all the time, and it drove me nuts. I eventually sorted it out, and I think it was due to a bad interaction with one of my add-on packages. Unfortunately I can't remember which. Or it might have been resolved when moving to a newer Emacs. Sorry I can't be more specific, but I feel your pain!
    – Tyler
    Jul 17, 2017 at 15:35
  • Can you post your init.el somewhere? I can take a look and see if I recognize the culprit
    – Tyler
    Nov 17, 2017 at 20:09
  • My init.el is just the spacemacs init.el, which I think is on GitHub somewhere.
    – Jonathan
    Nov 24, 2017 at 11:15
  • ok. I can confirm the problem using the default spacemacs install, so that's something
    – Tyler
    Nov 26, 2017 at 15:01
  • Hadn't looked at spacemacs before - it's very slick! However, it's also enormous, and I'm not sure how to go about debugging it. Perhaps there's a spacemacs-specific forum for dealing with config bugs?
    – Tyler
    Nov 26, 2017 at 15:36

1 Answer 1

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When that happens to me, this helps :

(defun my-find-file-check-make-large-file-read-only-hook ()
  "If a file is over a given size, make the buffer read only."
  (when (> (buffer-size) (* 30 1024 1024))
    (setq buffer-read-only t)
    (buffer-disable-undo)
    (fundamental-mode)))

(add-hook 'find-file-hooks 'my-find-file-check-make-large-file-read-only-hook)

OK, you can't edit the file, but at least you can read it without crashing Emacs.

Combine it with

(setq large-file-warning-threshold (* 35 1024 1024))

And finally, maybe vlfi can help.

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  • 1
    If I understand this correctly, this is the opposite of what I want to do, since fundamental-mode will disable highlighting of the file altogether, whereas I want syntax highlighting to work. I'm also not having problems with emacs crashing. It's not that I want to view a file, (I can do that with less or something), but edit it, so disabling editing is a bad idea.
    – Jonathan
    Jul 23, 2017 at 19:10

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