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My Emacs configuration (Emacs 27, Doom-Emacs config with lots of user-specific tweaks, running on MacOS) sometimes hangs at seemingly random times, and the kill -SIGUSR2 <emacs PID> has no effect. Debugging this would be a lot easier if there was a way to continuously redirect *Messages* and other debugging information to a log file, so I could identify what Emacs was doing (or trying to do) when it crashed.

Is there a way to continuously redirect/copy everything posted to the *Messages* and similar buffers to a file? Alternatively, is there a way to launch Emacs in "verbose" mode from the command line? Most of what I've found suggests running Emacs through gdb, but that's tricky (though not impossible) to set up on MacOS.

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  • For a few years now, I routinely run Emacs through gdb on OSX 10.6.8 and through lldb on El Capitan so that I can catch any crash when it happens. Who do you believe it is "tricky" to accomplish on your version of MacOS? For lldb, my notes indicate that I had to give permission with DevToolsSecurity -enable and that gave me a confirmation of "Developer mode is now enabled."..., but again that was on El Capitan. For OSX 10.6.8, I run ggdb from MacPorts instead of the built-in gdb. I have some notes regarding code-signing for ggdb on El Capitan, .... Commented Aug 26, 2020 at 21:52
  • My suggestion would be to bite the bullet by spending the time to get gdb working on your version of MacOS, build Emacs from source, and launch the binary from the src directory so that the .gdbinit is read ... Then, the Emacs developers can help you debug and perhaps even fix the problem. I spent quite a bit of time getting a newer version of gdb installed on my outdated version of Windows just so that I could obtain help from those Emacs developers who needed a specific debugging readout only available in newer versions of gdb .... Commented Aug 26, 2020 at 22:00

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