Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 88169
gvim forks on startup, causing numerous problems
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:52:49 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030313 Description of problem: WHen gvim starts up, it forks. This leads to problems when you've set gvim as your EDITOR or VISUAL. This is documented behavior, but it's still inconvenient, especially for a new user, that doesn't know this. The result is that a number of programs that use the EDITOR variable fail in mysterious ways, because gvim forks, and the program thinks the editor is done. Proposed fix: Add set guioptions+=f to the system vimrc file that is shipped with Red Hat Linux. There are some other good settings there already. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vim-common-6.1-29 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set EDITOR to gvim 2. Run a command that invokes EDITOR, for instance cvs commit Actual Results: The commit fails with: "Log message unchanged or not specified" Expected Results: CVS should wait until the editor is done, but doesn't because the editor forks. Additional info: I've contacted the maintainer of gvim, he said this is the desired behavior. I disagree, if you really want gvim to fork on startup, you can use the standard method and put an & after the command.
Other users are expecting this gvim behaviour from previous releases and I can't make the requested change to the vimrc and to the documentation. Please change your EDITOR setting to "gvim -f" or edit your /usr/share/vim/vim61/macros/vimrc if you want to change this for every user on your machine.
Please reconsider, I can't think of one single occasion where the default behavior is the best one. I know that a lot of users has been bitten by this bug though. I know how to fix it, so it's not a problem for me (anymore). Now that more and more people use gvim, they are sure to fall into this bug. Gvim is even a standard option in "Preferred programs", which sets the default editor to "gvim", not "gvim -f". If I get this fixed upstream, can you at least promise to let that change go through?
I intend to stay as close as possible to the upstream version. If you manage to convince Bram Moldenaar to change this upstream, I'll include his patch.