If you run "stty -ixon", it will prevent Ctrl-S from pausing the terminal. I understand that feature in the days of slow connections, but it feels rather silly at this point.

I use it to pause output from a running batch job (e.g. deployment).

This was my biggest hurdle to learning vim, I kept hitting Ctrl-S...

This might help:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_Ctrl-S_to_save_current_or_new_...

(Caveat emptor, can't speak from first hand experience.)

That is fascinating to me, in a train-wreck sort of way.

We had a discussion a few days ago about the ways in which some interfaces (command line in particular) can be user-hostile. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831429) Vim's Ctrl-S appears to be a function, keyboard-adjacent to several commonly-used functions, whose main effect for many users is "cause the program to fail immediately with no indication of how to fix it." I don't think I could make up a better example of user-hostile design if I tried.

It is not "Vim's Ctrl-S"; it's the terminal emulator's ctrl-s. Same thing happens in less, for example.

Ah, my mistake. Same criticism applies, though; possibly more so, as a terminal emulator running within a GUI would find it even easier to display a useful status message or similar.

I've never heard of Ctrl-S causing a crash, though. So your explanation at most accounts for the hangs.

I've used vim pretty much every work day in the last 15 years or so, and I can count the number of times it's crashed on one hand. If you can actually verify that it crashed (i.e. core dump file), then you've got the source available, and you can send in the patch.

It's never crashed on me. I'm not the person who claimed it crashed.