How to interrupt long run shell commands?

[Yevgnen]

Hi,

When I accidentally run a wrong long run shell command, helix is frozen and I have to kill it. How can I interrupt a running shell command? Thanks.

[the-mikedavis]

There is not currently a way. There are several rough edges for :run-shell-command and IMO it's a little out of scope to design around them since the shell command is mostly a stop-gap so that you can run at least some external commands and keybind them. In the long-run there may be an integrated terminal that would be more appropriate for non-trivial shell commands (#1976) and until then I would recommend using a separate shell (another terminal window, tmux split/tab/etc) for running non-trivial commands like cargo build, cargo test.

This particular case would be improved by #3029; it would prevent helix from blocking on the command but you would still not have the ability to kill the command except in a separate shell with kill.

See also #3337, #3155

[Yevgnen]

I agree with using a separate shell for long run tasks. But sometimes I just accidentally type a wrong command like find or tree in the ~ (perhaps I forget that currently I'm at ~) which lacks of changes to interrupt it...

[kabouzeid]

you can use kill in another shell to terminate the spawned process. not ideal, I know, but that's all we have for now