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More or less. Pharo has a green thread implementation. I will tell you what I understand. Green threads means, there is only ONE OS thread, and then, internally (in Smalltalk) there exists their own threads, scheduler, priorities, etc. The UI is just a process that is running, with a certain priority. Go to the world menu, then "Tools" -> "Process Browser". There you will see all the current processes with their priorities. You can notice the UI process.

�So...whatever you do here, it will be done inside that process. If you do normal things, then yes, I guess the UI freezes. However, you way want to launch another thread to do what you want and with a lower priority than the UI.

Do this test: open a workspace and a transcript. In the workspace, evaluate:

[ 1000 timesRepeat: [Transcript show: 'mariano'; cr] ] forkAt: Processor userBackgroundPriority

there, you will see that you are able to use the ide, while the block of writing to Transcript is working "at the same time".

Here the most important message is forkAt:��� . fork just fork the block with the standard priority ("Processor activePriority"). If you want to specify the priority, you have to use forkAt:

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Yes, Sockets are an example where sometimes they block the whole image. Are you behind a proxy ? do you have a timeout error after a while ?
I have just tested and it also freezes for me in Mac OS. I have no idea. Maybe other can help.

But yes, usually (sometimes it doesn't work) there is a combination of keys that send a system interruption. Check this links:

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/899
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1542

BTW Adrian, I think this deserves a FAQ entry as it has been asked several times.

Cheers

Mariano
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