the corner office : Ctrl-S hangs an xterm

Ctrl-S hangs an xterm

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

Comments

1. Rok (2011.01.20 - 07.18) #

Thx.

2. Chris (2012.11.12 - 18.08) #

Me too! Thank you so much! It was bugging me big time... now how do we unmap it?!

3. 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.

4. sandy (2010.09.11 - 23.42) #

Very Helpful! THanks a lot!

5. Michael Longval (2013.02.10 - 22.05) #

Thanks you very , very much.

This was driving me nuts!!!!!

6. bash (2008.11.20 - 19.48) #

thanks man.

7. Peter (2014.02.02 - 22.51) #

LOL, me too man, me too. Thanks for the post. :)

8. 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!

9. julia (2014.01.21 - 07.53) #

Thank you SOOOOO much!!!!!

10. Narendra (2010.10.05 - 05.07) #

Very Helpful!

11. decebal2dac (2013.02.18 - 22.38) #

waaaaaaaaaaaaaa :*:*::*

12. Shah (2015.03.03 - 13.27) #

This is really useful info. Thanks.

13. dopamine (2015.09.19 - 00.00) #

Halleluja!!!

14. Keyur (2011.07.28 - 10.20) #

Thanks lot... Any idea how to disable 'Ctrl-S' from xterm?

15. Amaelitha (2011.08.10 - 17.32) #

Fantastic ! Thanks !!
It happened to me a lot of times. If only I had searched google earlier...

16. 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.

17. daniel (2011.05.23 - 10.01) #

very very helpful. thx a lot!

18. 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.

19. Trashead (2010.04.16 - 03.17) #

Thanks Man!!!

20. Deepak (2014.06.12 - 22.19) #

This is truly helpful, Thanks !!!!

21. Rob (2011.06.14 - 16.44) #

Brilliant. I cannot tell you how much frustration this has liberated from my life.

22. HV Gowda (2010.06.08 - 01.18) #

Thanks a lot it is very helpfull :-).

23. 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

24. Ulises (2011.05.14 - 02.22) #

It also worked for me, I was going to contact IT department, but google is always faster :)

25. alvin (2013.04.28 - 07.00) #

haha æ??ä¸?å¤ç?¬å??~
haha thanks~

26. Allan Daemon (2011.05.15 - 23.58) #

THANKS A LOT!!!

27. Vitalii (2012.01.20 - 18.59) #

Thanks a lot.

28. 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!!

29. Sal (2012.11.29 - 16.01) #

For years this bugged me...THANKS! One keystroke I won't forget.

30. suman (2008.05.13 - 12.43) #

This is the thing I was looking for long time; great thing, of great help. Thank you.

31. tednoob (2012.02.07 - 10.15) #

I... I... I love you.

32. Narmada (2009.05.13 - 01.19) #

Thank u. It is very helpful.

33. varun (2011.03.25 - 09.12) #

THANKS A LOT!!!

34. Anuradha (2010.10.21 - 06.42) #

It worked for me. Thanks a lot. Was looking for it from long time

35. 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...

36. Pat (2010.07.09 - 23.04) #

Thanks, this helped.

37. 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.

38. James Strong (2010.08.19 - 14.03) #

That was SO very helpful, I just kept restart the xterm session.

39. David (2008.11.05 - 21.58) #

This trick made my day. Thank you!!

40. Marto (2012.08.15 - 15.31) #

¡Excellent!

41. loonies (2010.12.28 - 04.13) #

hahhaha, I'm not the only one :)
thanks a lot!

42. Priya Sundararajan (2011.04.18 - 15.28) #

Thanks!

43. white_rotten_rabbit (2009.08.28 - 12.19) #

Thank you very much from me too, what a great help!

44. 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!!