Ctrl+s Causes Vim to Freeze
2013-09-20
As I was working today, my Vim instance stopped responding completely. I ended up killing the tmux tab that Vim was in and starting a fresh one. I thought it was weird that Vim froze, but I just moved on. Then it happened again and I noticed what caused it: I accidentally pressed Ctrl+s. This causes my terminal (tmux is the culprit, I think) to pause accepting input. So it appeared that Vim had frozen, but it actually had not.
To get out of this predicament, just press
Ctrl+q
and you can resume your Vimming. Pretty odd, especially since it appears to issue all of your input-while-paused at once. I'm not sure what the purpose of the pausing is, but I'm guessing it's useful to someone.