Opening binary files results in a livelock

[Piiit]

 * Xed version (xed --version) 1.4.6
 * Distribution - (Mint 17.2, Arch, Fedora 25, etc...) LM18.2

Issue
Accidentally opening a binary file with xed results in a livelock.

Steps to reproduce
Open a binary file from any file manager using xed, or open a binary file in a running xed instance.

Expected behavior
Two possibilities:

1. Xed should say: This is a binary file. I cannot open it.
2. Xed could have a binary editor (plugin) to show binary files. Maybe this is out of scope for Xed, which is supposed to be a simple text editor.

Other information
Untested: Maybe the same problem occurs with a text file containing unknown characters or with a strange encoding.

[haarp]

Xed should say: This is a binary file. I cannot open it.

No! This has been a major annoyance with older gedit versions. As soon as it encountered a char that couldn't be rendered with any charset, it just gave up, closed anything rendered so far and bailed out. Let's not return to these dark ages.

[JosephMcc]

@Piiit Could you provide a file that shows the issue?

[Piiit]

@JosephMcc Just take any PDF or image file.

[JosephMcc]

@Piiit this is what I get when I open a png here. It's about what I expect. Not sure what "livelock" means but xed is still working fine.

[Piiit]

@JosephMcc I tested now with different binary files of various sizes. It seems that it does not lock up, but just take really long to open the file. I see a progress bar on top of the text view after 1 or 2 minutes, with a cancel button, but the whole GUI is not responsible if the file is several MB big. The CPU goes up and the fan is constantly spinning. I think it just takes a long time to open the file and highlight the text. However, the cancel button is not responsible. I have to kill xed manually or wait a long time till everything is loaded, or the click action triggered. So this is not a livelock, but a event handling issue(?), I guess. Should I close the issue therefore?

[JosephMcc]

File loading is handled by the GtkSource API's. I think upstream knows that this is an area that could be improved. Testing a 2MB video file in xed and gedit, the results are very similar. In Fact xed seems to handle it a bit better.

I'm going to close this since it isn't really on our side.