Sublime Forum

ST3 (dev 3208) changes focus every 10 seconds or so (Windows, not OSX)

#1

Like the title says, while using Sublime Text, it will lose focus every ten seconds or so and then come back to itself after it’s done doing whatever pulled it away. I can’t pinpoint when or why it does this or what might be triggering it. I did find out though in the Windows Event log, it’s crashing like crazy all the time, but it never actually crashes for me visually, it just loses focus and then comes back.

Also of note, I was hoping upgrading to 3208 would solve whatever issue this was, but it was happening on the 3207 as well.

I’ll attach my specs and one of the log reports from the event viewer. And if you’re wondering, I don’t have any git packages installed. I was hoping that would be it since others had what I thought was my same issue, but I never installed any git packages so I don’t know what it could be.

I’d be glad to answer any questions or provide more info that you may require to help troubleshoot this further.

Annotation%202019-08-09%20114822

Windows Event Viewer (one of thousands that are all Sublime Text related)

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: APPCRASH
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: sublime_text.exe
P2: 1.0.0.1
P3: 5cb99b74
P4: sublime_text.exe
P5: 1.0.0.1
P6: 5cb99b74
P7: c0000005
P8: 000000000000a2ce
P9: 
P10: 

Attached files:
\\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\Temp\WER7B23.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml

These files may be available here:
\\?\C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_sublime_text.exe_5931532a9ba0ca5c70178896e893dff9c5db401e_afeefb99_871a48f2-b4ca-4ed9-8c83-cb4d224fb356

Analysis symbol: 
Rechecking for solution: 0
Report Id: b8e05cce-837d-48fb-9487-314e31a8902e
Report Status: 100
Hashed bucket: 
Cab Guid: 0

Here’s another log from Event Viewer, Administrative Events

Faulting application name: sublime_text.exe, version: 1.0.0.1, time stamp: 0x5cb99b74
Faulting module name: sublime_text.exe, version: 1.0.0.1, time stamp: 0x5cb99b74
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000000a2ce
Faulting process id: 0xbb8
Faulting application start time: 0x01d54ed3ee9a9f51
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe
Report Id: 893631ff-5468-4d08-bbad-f4f55179fe9f
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Thank you,
Clayton

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#2

Anyone with suggestions or first steps to try? Could it be part of the OSX issue other people were having, but for a Windows machine? I’d love any suggestions because it’s really killing my productivity… a lot.

Thanks!

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#3

Just got this error message when I went into CSScomb README.md file from preferences > package settings. Any guesses as to what this is or if it’s related to my initial posts problem?

image

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#4

The usual advice in a case like this would be to try adding all of the third party packages that you’ve installed to the list of ignored_packages to see if the problem goes away and then slowly remove them and test to see if one of them causes the problem to manifest. Alternately you can temporarily revert to a freshly installed state to quickly do the same or (since you’re on Windows) try a Portable version instead (which is divorced from your settings) to see if the problem persists there.

This error message is generally caused by having third party syntaxes installed that replace syntaxes that ship with Sublime; a common culprit for this is using the Naomi package for example, although there are undoubtedly others (That’s just the first one that came to mind).

Essentially the root of the issue is that syntaxes can embed other syntaxes, such as Markdown embedding the Python syntax so that you can syntax highlight Python code blocks markdown, or the HTML syntax embedding JavaScript so that <script> tags show the correct syntax.

The embedding is done by combining all of the rules of all of the embedded syntax with the one doing the embedding, which happens recursively (e.g. if you embed HTML, then your embedded copy of HTML also embeds JavaScript as well). There are a couple of reasons why this message would appear.

The first is a literal recursion; somewhere along the way one of the syntaxes refers to another syntax that ends up embedding syntaxes in a manner that ends the embedding back up where it started.

The other is that too many syntaxes are being combined together or that the syntaxes in question have too many collective rules.

Objectively, the syntax system can’t determine which of those two things is happening, it only notices that the list of rule contexts is excessively high and refuses to continue because it could exhaust all available memory.

This isn’t something that happens with the Markdown syntax that ships with Sublime (although there can be a noticeable delay upon first opening a Markdown file because it embeds so many syntaxes) so for this to be happening either the Markdown syntax or one of the syntaxes that it embeds (or both) have been altered.

The general solution is to try and determine what add-on package is causing the problem (using the same mechanism as above) and then either removing it or selectively disabling some of the syntaxes it’s trying to include by adding their packages to ignored_packages so that Sublime ignores them.

3 Likes
#5

Thank you very much! I have never used the ignored_packages, I’ll have to give that a try and see how it goes from there. I’ll get back and let you know what the culprit was. As for the recursive syntax error, I don’t have a ton of packages, and they’re all top packages, so I don’t know what could have happened. Either way, let’s see what happens.

Thanks!

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#6

I think I found the culprit, CSS3! I went through packages one by one and started to disable them and I initially skipped that one thinking it couldn’t be it, but it seems to have stopped when I disabled it.

Thank you so much for your advice to get this fixed!

1 Like