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

[Steven Lembark]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2022 10:37:40 +0100
Thorsten Maerz <info at netztorte.de> wrote:

> 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.
> 

My copy of the external editor uses "-fork" to keep it in the
foreground so that claws doesn't see it exiting. 

claws-mail --debug w/ reply to this message:

https://pastebin.com/MbhT2AFr

Q: Is the "skipping stuff" normal? Or might my config file be corrupt?

-- 
Steven Lembark
Workhorse Computing
lembark at wrkhors.com
+1 888 359 3508