[Users] Oddity: Recent upgrade to claws leaves my external editor with a blank page

[Thorsten Maerz]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2022 16:15:34 -0500
Steven Lembark <lembark at wrkhors.com> wrote:

> Claws Mail version 3.18.0
> Current setting for external programs/editor is:
> 	vile '%s'
> Been working for years, until the last upgrade. 
> [...]
> Other change is that even if I put content into the initally
> empty editor file it does not get transferred into the claws-
> mail editor window. 

Works perfectly here (e.g. 3.18.0 on Ubuntu, 4.0.0 on Win10).
Ext. editor command is
	gvim -f '%s'

The "-f" flag is required (on Linux) to keep the editor as a foreground
process (otherwise claws would think, the editor was immediately
closed right after it was opened, leading to an unchanged message).
Maybe, vile needs a similar flag? I found this ("+fork") for xvile:
  https://www.mail-archive.com/vile@nongnu.org/msg00116.html

There has been a change to the ext. editor code after 3.17.8 to use
portable glib functions to start and watch the editor process, so this
might explain a different behaviour for editors, which put itself
into background.

But that doesn't explain, why the tmpmsg.* files are empty - that
code was not affected by the change.

> There is a change in the scratch files also. They used to look
> like
> 	tmpfile.<decimal numeric>"
> now they look like 
> 	tmpmsg.<hex string>

The filenames haven't changed. The "tmpfile.*" are e.g. generated
during drag&drop operations.
The file for ext. editor was always named "tmpmsg.*".

> Catch is that the old tempfile.* files had content; the new
> tmpmsg.* files are all empty (see listing below).

Try running claws with the "--debug" flag and watch the output for
errors/warnings when starting the ext. editor.

I don't see, how these empty files could be caused by the change
(mentioned above) and rather think of too little space in tmp folder,
access rights or charset conversion problems.

-- 
Best regards,
Thorsten