After dragging the window from the menu bar, no input is sent to Emacs

[Gabriel Peredo Rosas]

Binary package hint: emacs23

On Lucid, using Emacs 23 GTK+, after I drag the window from the menu bar no input seems sent to be sent to Emacs, unlike in Gedit or Evolution, where the application behaves normally afterwards. Emacs turns back to normal after I click one of the menu items.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: emacs (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-21.32-generic 2.6.32.11+drm33.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-21-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Apr 25 16:40:11 2010
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=es_CL.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: emacs23

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

I've dragged the window and clicked in the buffer and trying to type. Nothing happens & when i scroll with mouse or press arrow keys the highlight of the toolbar buttons gets scrolled. This is the only intterraction I can do.

[bobdobbs (sunil-sunil)]

confirmed on lynx with GNU Emacs 23.1.1

[James Henstridge (jamesh)]

It doesn't need to be a drag. Simply clicking on the menu bar outside of any of the buttons is enough to reproduce the behaviour. Clicking on one of the menus is enough to unfreeze things.

[dcam (david-pastornet)]

I'm seeing this too on lucid lynx with emacs 22.2.1

[Rudy Neeser (the-river)]

I can confirm that all that is required is a click on the menubar outside of any menu item. Emacs then appears to completely freeze (the cursor stops blinking, no text is placed in the buffer when you type, and if the mini-buffer was active, it also does not accept any text).

Clicking on any menuitem causes emacs to unfreeze (the cursor begins to blink again) and the various buffers once again accept input.

[bobdobbs (sunil-sunil)]

Clicking on a menuitem, while providing a temporary fix, isn't really a suitable long term solution in my opinion.

For me at least, this means that I have to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back again. This is disruptive.

[dcam (david-pastornet)]

Is this something specific to emacs, or is this a deeper problem with X?

I'm running up-to-date 10.04 and I've seen this problem, but I've also noticed some other weird X stuff happening in other applications, where the application becomes non-responsive in a similar way until I left click in its window. This never used to happen.

[Rudy Neeser (the-river)]

I haven't looked at the sources, but I think this has something to do with the changes made to the GTK menu bar widget for the Ayatana project (they made it possible to drag a GTK app by dragging on the menu bar) and with how emacs is expecting the menu bar to behave.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

This was fixed by these upstream commits:
http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/commitdiff/779d00723cf772d240f3c5c2facd214a776a424e
http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/commitdiff/34ec65ff9f71734511755226586e674b39d49768
http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/commitdiff/d1f48a4dc26d6bb94ed553a3dacbdfda9821b45e
Here’s a patch with these commits against the version of Emacs 23.2 that was proposed for merge in bug 588203. A fixed package is built in my PPA <https://launchpad.net/~anders-kaseorg/+archive/ppa>.

I don’t know if backporting the fix to Emacs 23.1 is worth it, but if anyone wants to try, you will probably need this patch first:
http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/commitdiff/3dbcc246b0e16fa51d8cce0b53bfc0ea59486bee

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Submitting this for sponsorship now that the 23.2 merge has gone through.

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

patch tested and confirmed that it fixes the described problem. Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package emacs23 - 23.2+1-4ubuntu2

---------------
emacs23 (23.2+1-4ubuntu2) natty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/fix-menus.diff: Fix http://debbugs.gnu.org/6499
    (Emacs gets stuck waiting for menu input). (LP: #569914)
 -- Anders Kaseorg <email address hidden> Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:56:10 -0400

[Fabien Tassin (fta)]

could it be what made ecb regressed in Natty? LP bug 700924

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Fabien: I doubt it, because this bug was fixed two months ago, and it doesn’t really match the same symptoms anyway.

[Jason Cline (jcline)]

This looks like it was fixed in Natty. Any chance we'll see this happen in lucid as well.