When I load 50GB of data in my RAM it is all fine. Playing AAA games, multi-threaded bulk data processing, all good.
But when Kate loads a 540KB file it sends all cores to 100% for a couple of minutes and then flat-out halts my system. The same file in Pycharm for example is no problem.
I’ve noticed for the past years that everything above a few KB’s is hard for Kate to handle, I always had this problem, on many machines and with many Manjaro versions. I wonder why this is and I’d like to fix it if possible.
Recovering from a complete system freeze is such a pain I didn’t try anything. I know this is not ‘the way’ but I can’t crash my PC 20 times to find a problem, I do not want to piss it off
Are you aware of the fact that you can kill a misbehaving application?
It may take a bit of time, depending on how hard it’s hitting your CPUs, but the first thing to try before hitting the reset or power buttons on your computer is press Ctrl+Alt+Esc. Again, it may take some time, but you’ll see the cursor change into a . Position the cursor on the misbehaving window and left-click. Of course, whatever data you had entered in said application will have been lost.
Disclaimer: I do not know whether this works on Wayland, but it has been a built-in feature of X11 since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Thanks, I tried this in the past but maybe I was not patient enough! Do I keep hitting the Ctrl+Alt+Esc, keep it pressed or hit it (a few times) and wait? I run X11 so I’ll try it out.
At the moment the file loads fine, maybe the first time Kate opens it there is some background process for JSON formatting or something? I’ll try t cook up a new evil file to make it hurt.
Press it just once, and make sure that you position the cursor only on the offending window — if you position it on the desktop, it’ll kill your entire session.
If the cursor does not move right away, keep trying to position it. Then, once the cursor is on the offending window, left-click and wait. It does work.
Not sure when you last tried that but it doesn’t work on KDE. KSysguard had this feature back then though.
Also Kate has no issue handling small to big files I use it a lot it works normally.
Gigantic files though could be an issue, especially with abnormally long lines.
Kate handles big text files pretty good as long as text inside them is split into short lines.
But performance problems show up when a file contains at least one very long line.
$ ls -lh /var/log/pacman.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.8M Jun 17 00:00 /var/log/pacman.log
$ kate /var/log/pacman.log
No problem at all handling a 2.8 MB log file.
The only times I’ve noticed it struggles is on massive files with no carriage returns, especially if it’s trying to do syntax highlighting (e.g. minified json files).
I’ve already done that when I saw that the Plasma default is Meta+Ctrl+Esc.
And yes, you are correct — it stopped working. But still, it’s a feature of X11 itself, so I’m guessing that it’s now disabled by default, just like the old way of killing the entire X11 session with Ctrl+Backspace.
At first, they made it so that you had to press it twice within a certain timeout, but I’m guessing it’ll be completely disabled by default now, and that you need to create a file in /etc/xorg.conf.d/ if you want to re-enable it.
Yes, you said it already, then, do the same test for the shortcut on Wayland to see if it works because of the KDE shortcut (built-in feature of KDE) or if ti works because of something else when there is no shortcut.
@Thijxx As far as Kate is concerned, I’ve had no issues even with quite large files … but not sure about THAT large. I’ll have to open one (or create one) to check this out.
By the way for all … if you want a command this is what plasma uses
qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin killWindow
You can map that to any other shortcut you like.
I set it as a function in my .bashrc
(I used kkill because kde and wkill supposedly exists, though I cannot find it easily)
. Position the cursor on the misbehaving window and left-click. Of course, whatever data you had entered in said application will have been lost.
