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I have a problem with haskell-mode where Emacs will hang every time I open up a Haskell file. Mashing Ctrl-g a few times will get the file opened.

So I would imagine setting debug-on-quit would allow me to debug the issue. But it doesn't. No debugger shows up. Likewise if I run this elisp code (while 1). Emacs locks up, Ctrl-g will will break out of the hang, but no debugger.

I can sometimes bring up the debugger. Say if I run grep and then Ctrl-g whilst it is running, I will get a backtrace popping up.

So I'm not totally sure what is going on. Is there another way I should be debugging this hang with haskell-mode?

GNU Emacs 26.2 (build 1, x86_64-apple-darwin17.7.0, Carbon Version 158 AppKit 1561.6)

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    In your (while 1) example, C-g does bring me the debugger as expected.
    – xuchunyang
    Jun 20, 2019 at 11:09
  • Ah interesting. It does bring up the debugger if I break in the scratch buffer, but not if I break in ielm.
    – Mongus Pong
    Jun 20, 2019 at 11:24
  • Oh, I see, that's because ielm captures the quit signal via (condition-case err ... (quit ...)).
    – xuchunyang
    Jun 20, 2019 at 12:50
  • Most likely this is a font-lock problem. Try to disable global-font-lock-mode before opening the file.
    – Lindydancer
    Jun 20, 2019 at 18:56
  • @Lindydancer Ah, yes you are correct. That does stop the hanging! But I now have no syntax highlighting.. How did you find this out?
    – Mongus Pong
    Jun 20, 2019 at 21:58

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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So it seems that I was able to bypass the problem from occuring whilst opening the file by disabling global-font-lock-mode (M-x global-font-lock-mode). (Thanks to @Lindydancers advice.)

For reasons currently unknown to me, if Emacs hangs whilst opening the file, pressing Ctrl-G doesn't bring up the debugger.

This did at least allow me to open the file. While editing the file Emacs would occasionally hang, and this time pressing Ctrl-G did bring up the debugger which did allow me to locate where the problem was. There is something going on in the Lexer of haskell mode.

So although I don't fully understand why the debugger didn't open during file load, if you have a similar hang whilst opening the file, it is probably well worth disabling font-lock-mode which should get you a few steps further to debugging the actual issue.

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    I think the debugger is suppressed during redisplay, and redisplay might the one calling font-lock.
    – npostavs
    Jun 22, 2019 at 1:54
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Try sending Emacs the SIGUSR2 signal, or whatever signal is specified by the Emacs variable debug-on-event. The easiest way to do this is probably to run killall -SIGUSR2 emacs.

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  • If you can put Emacs into a responsive state, then M-: (emacs-pid) will tell you the process ID number to use: kill -SIGUSR2 <pid>
    – phils
    Jul 14, 2021 at 6:04
  • Failing that, I would personally always use ps to figure out which PID to use, as I invariably have more than one instance of Emacs running.
    – phils
    Jul 14, 2021 at 6:05
  • Also note that debug-on-quit is set when this signal is processed. You can use M-x toggle-debug-on-quit to switch that off again.
    – phils
    Jul 14, 2021 at 6:09

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