I use pdf-tools for reading and recently started using bookmark+ and dired+ for navigating. Unfortunately these two great packages seems to conflict.
One of the issues I noticed was that the bookmark+ command for bookmarking a pdf location in a pdf-tools buffer didn’t work; it gave an empty buffer warning. Turns out bookmark+ creator Drew Adams had already suggested a workaround which I discovered here: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/72786/bookmark-plus-and-pdf-tools-pdf-view-error
So that solved or at least patched that issue. But then I noticed that with dired+ installed and any fairly large pdf opened in pdf-tools, emacs will freeze if you attempt to do dired-jump or helm-find-files. Dired-jump without dired+ is not affected by the size of the pdf at all and just opens the underlying directory immediately. But with dired+ anything above about 1mb or so hangs it for quite a while, anything around 10mb or more just freezes it for minutes on end to the point that unless you want to go make yourself lunch and coffee, you will have to force kill emacs to keep working.
As a noob, non-techie, non-developer, I just wanted to ask, what is the right way of asking about possibly getting this issue fixed, because I love these two packages and would love to have both in working order, but obviously don’t have the coding know how to do it myself. Of course if anybody knows of a fix that’s already out there for this issue, I’d love to know about that as well.
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Try commenting out the definition of
dired-jumpin dired+.el, and see if that makes a difference. (The main difference is that the Dired+ version opens the directory listing with the destination, it it’s hidden.)Then
M-x diredp-send-bug-report. Provide your Emacs release, platform etc. info, and preferably a recipe starting fromemacs -Q. Thx.Maybe check also with the pdf-tools maintainer.
Thanks for your suggestion. I still had the same issue. I notice that helm-commands called when in the pdf-tools buffer also freeze, not just the dired-jump (C-x C-j) command. The helm buffer opens when you do helm find files or helm locate etc. But then when you move down and try to open a folder, emacs freezes. It doesn’t freeze if you just open a file. So it is any command that wants to get you to a dired buffer from the pdf-tools-buffer. I.e. C-x d freezes, helm-find-files, helm-locate - all freeze if you use them to try to open a dired buffer. But helm freezing doesn’t occur in a pdf-tools buffer when dired+ is not loaded, meaning dired+ is definitely what causes it. But in a non-pdf-tools buffer with dired+ loaded helm works fine. So it has something to do with pdf-tools and dired+ being in conflict.
So the problem is apparently not with Dired+'s
dired-jump, but something else in Dired+. But if you can repro the problem easily usingdired-jump, maybe tryM-x debug-on-entry dired-jumpand step through the debugger to see what seems to be the problem - withemacs -Qand just Dired+ and PDF-tools loaded. But instead of trying to debug it here,M-x diredp-send-bug-report, as mentioned above.Thanks so much. I will try doing that some time soon. I’ve never tried debugging before but it’s a good chance to learn how so I think this will be kind of fun.
din the debugger steps into evaluating the current sexp to be evaluated.csteps past it, i.e., it evaluates it without digging into the steps of evaluating it.So you can use
cto skip over steps that you don’t want to get into in to detail, and usedotherwise.I’ll try that. Thanks. I just tried your suggestion of emacs -Q and that revealed something interesting, which is that with just pdf-tools and dired+ loaded, jumping to dired works fine. But then I installed and activated helm and then the problem of freezing appears. So it seems to have something to do with using these 3 packages together.
Keep investigating. (I assume the problem doesn’t arise with just Helm and PDF-tools (i.e., without Dired+).)
I will keep at it. No, I’ve used helm and pdf-tools together for years, and I only had the problem just recently when I started using dired+. Anyway, I’ll do that “diredp-send-bug-report” you suggested as follow up, and maybe even open an issue with helm. I recently reported a helm issue and they literally fixed it by the next day. I was so happily surprised that I am now a patreon supporter!
I tried debug-on-entry before calling dired-jump and didn’t see any errors. I am not sure if I know what I am looking at when I drill down to the active variables. As I mentioned, it is not completely frozen, it is just taking a very long time when there is a large pdf in the buffer, so it might not throw an error.
But I did do another test which seems to rule out helm in itself as the problem. In an emacs with no packages except pdf-tools and dired+ the same problem occurs in ido-mode, but NOT when simply using the default basic completion style. Ido-mode offers completion candidates, but just as with helm, when you try to go to a dired buffer, emacs hangs. With no dired+, the same operation in ido-mode works smoothly. So it seems the issue is being caused by dired+ in combination with not just helm, but ido completion. I could try other completion packages, I suppose, to see if those also have the same problem.
I will also do what you suggest and maybe open an issue with pdf-tools.
I am a layperson, but the problem seems to be that the kind of buffer variable pdf tool creates doesn’t work if the files are big with whatever functions dired+ uses to handle those buffers whereas the functions for “go to dired buffer from pdf-tools buffer” that get called without dired+ installed do handle the pdf-tool buffers. So yeah, that could be just as easily be a problem either with the way pfd-tools creates the buffers or with how dired+ handles them. Dired+ works fine with everything else when jumping to dired.
Anyway, that was the thought process of a former English major.