I'm sure this happens to lots of people with a Windows background (or even people who live in 'modern' editors like Kate or gedit). Editing in vim, and instead of hitting Escape and :w to save the file, I hit Ctrl-S. Instead of saving the file, the vim session 'hangs' and won't respond to the usual keypresses. This happened to me once before and I must admit that the last time I manually killed the vim process. This time around Google was at hand, and now I know I'm not the only one who's had this problem :-)
Solution: it's not vim's fault, it's actually an xterm thing. In xterm, Ctrl-S is a kind of scroll lock and locks the console. Hitting Ctrl-Q gets things back to normal.
{2005.03.12 01:53}
Comments:
1. Pradeep (2006.11.10 - 05:56) #
This is very useful information, i earlier faced this problem and lost my changes as i killed the session manually.
2. suman (2008.05.13 - 12:43) #
This is the thing I was looking for long time; great thing, of great help. Thank you.
3. Cliff (2008.10.23 - 14:00) #
Thank you so much. I already killed more than 10 sessions for this problem. I should search google earlier...
4. David (2008.11.05 - 21:58) #
This trick made my day. Thank you!!
5. bash (2008.11.20 - 19:48) #
6. Narmada (2009.05.13 - 01:19) #
Thank u. It is very helpful.
7. white_rotten_rabbit (2009.08.28 - 12:19) #
Thank you very much from me too, what a great help!
8. Trashead (2010.04.16 - 03:17) #
9. HV Gowda (2010.06.08 - 01:18) #
Thanks a lot it is very helpfull :-).
10. Pat (2010.07.09 - 23:04) #
11. James Strong (2010.08.19 - 14:03) #
That was SO very helpful, I just kept restart the xterm session.
12. sandy (2010.09.11 - 23:42) #
Very Helpful! THanks a lot!
13. Narendra (2010.10.05 - 05:07) #
14. Anuradha (2010.10.21 - 06:42) #
It worked for me. Thanks a lot. Was looking for it from long time
15. loonies (2010.12.28 - 04:13) #
hahhaha, I'm not the only one :)
thanks a lot!
16. Rok (2011.01.20 - 07:18) #
17. varun (2011.03.25 - 09:12) #
18. Priya Sundararajan (2011.04.18 - 15:28) #
19. Ulises (2011.05.14 - 02:22) #
It also worked for me, I was going to contact IT department, but google is always faster :)
20. Allan Daemon (2011.05.15 - 23:58) #
21. daniel (2011.05.23 - 10:01) #
very very helpful. thx a lot!
22. Rob (2011.06.14 - 16:44) #
Brilliant. I cannot tell you how much frustration this has liberated from my life.
23. Keyur (2011.07.28 - 10:20) #
Thanks lot... Any idea how to disable 'Ctrl-S' from xterm?
24. Amaelitha (2011.08.10 - 17:32) #
Fantastic ! Thanks !!
It happened to me a lot of times. If only I had searched google earlier...
25. Anand (2011.11.30 - 10:51) #
Thanks a real lot. This has ended a long-standing point of frustration for me. I can't recount how many xterms/screens I have had to kill because of this stupid problem. Somehow thought of googling it very late in the day.
Brilliant.
Anand
26. Vitalii (2012.01.20 - 18:59) #
27. tednoob (2012.02.07 - 10:15) #
28. Vidya Teli (2012.02.16 - 05:46) #
thanks a lot, it was happening a lot as i was using cscope ctrl \s, everytime i had to kill xterm!!
29. rev (2012.04.19 - 19:51) #
thanks for posting this... i hit ctrl-s instead of ctrl-d in vim when my hands were not on the keyboard quite right. this has happened several times and i end up killing my terminal session and losing my document changes.
30. Marto (2012.08.15 - 15:31) #
31. Mehul (2012.09.23 - 22:17) #
Thanks a ton! It was kind of frustrating when it was happening in a working xterm, now I have solution with your help.
32. Chethan (2012.10.24 - 08:41) #
Thanks a lot !!!!
Great info..... i was wondering why this is happening tried even xterm help ... no use
Thanks for the very useful info!!
33. Chris (2012.11.12 - 18:08) #
Me too! Thank you so much! It was bugging me big time... now how do we unmap it?!
34. a s d f (2012.11.23 - 15:32) #
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I almost destroyed my keyboard trying to get vim alive.
35. Sal (2012.11.29 - 16:01) #
For years this bugged me...THANKS! One keystroke I won't forget.
36. Michael Longval (2013.02.10 - 22:05) #
Thanks you very , very much.
This was driving me nuts!!!!!
37. decebal2dac (2013.02.18 - 22:38) #
38. alvin (2013.04.28 - 07:00) #
haha æ??ä¸?å¤ç?¬å??~
haha thanks~
39. julia (2014.01.21 - 07:53) #
Thank you SOOOOO much!!!!!
40. Peter (2014.02.02 - 22:51) #
LOL, me too man, me too. Thanks for the post. :)
41. Eric (2014.02.06 - 15:56) #
This happens occasionally and it sometimes takes me 15 minutes to find a webpage to remind me of the keys required to undo it. I'm finally bookmarking this page! Thanks!
42. Deepak (2014.06.12 - 22:19) #
This is truly helpful, Thanks !!!!
43. Shah (2015.03.03 - 13:27) #
This is really useful info. Thanks.
44. dopamine (2015.09.19 - 00:00) #
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