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Shortening the ropeShortening the ropePosted Apr 3, 2009 19:28 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)Parent article: Shortening the rope I fear that this will reveal what an old geezer I am, but I've been using some flavor of Emacs (Gosling's Emacs or GNU Emacs) for 26 years now (OK, I started while in my teens, and at least I'm younger than RMS, but not by a whole lot). I've never hit control-alt-anything by accident, or even on purpose as an Emacs key sequence, and that's because in Emacs, any alt-key can also be typed by preceding the key with ESC, so I would never attempt to hold down both control and alt and hit a key while using Emacs. That's reserved for special three-finger salutes, and it's painful enough to do that it's not going to happen unless I really, really intend to do that. control-meta-H is "mark-defun" (mark the current function) in Emacs, but everyone types it as ESC followed by control-H. Anyone who ever does otherwise would long ago learned not to do that, since they would no longer have an X server.
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Shortening the rope Posted Apr 3, 2009 19:47 UTC (Fri) by Thue (subscriber, #14277) [Link]
Slightly related:
When running emacs in putty on Windows, I have accidentally hit CTRL-SHIFT. In user-friendly Windows, this enabled-by-default shortcut has the effect of changing my keyboard layout in the active application from Danish to US.
Having your keyboard layout changed is not very intuitive, especially since you will probably first notice the change many keystrokes later. It took me literally years of spurious keymap switches to figure out what was causing the problem.
Enlightenment... Posted Apr 3, 2009 22:37 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]
Ah that explains why I was getting confused when I was using a Windows box a few months back. I kept having to go into the localisation config panel to fix things.
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 4, 2009 1:15 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]
Having your keyboard changed on you silently is no fun; I had my keyboard changed from US to German or something on an upgrade once, and spent the next few hours discovering why it wouldn't let me log in. My username, unlike my password, had all the characters on the same keys...
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 3, 2009 22:37 UTC (Fri) by dododge (subscriber, #2870) [Link]
Yeah, I have to concur. I'm a 20-year user of emacs, and you could remove the alt keys from my keyboard and I'd hardly notice. I normally use the aforementioned ESC prefix instead, but if you don't want to move off the home row you can even get around that by using C-[. I think the last time I touched an actual meta key was on a DECStation keyboard in the early 90s, and it would never occur to me to try to chord those sequences on a modern system.
Also, I do use ctrl-alt-backspace on purpose all the time. At work I manually start the X server and use C-A-BS to quit on a daily basis. At home there is some sort of race such that the X server never sees all of my video cards immediately after a power cycle, until I C-A-BS gdm and let it probe a second time. Then there are crazy X11 bugs requiring a server restart, which I encounter up to several times a day on my home system (a problem that began immediately after I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, sigh).
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 4, 2009 0:00 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I'm a long-term XEmacs user who uses the meta key constantly, despite
starting out in TTYs with ESC the only option: but my keyboard (a Maltron) is sufficiently bizarre that I had to almost relearn typing, at least non-alphanumeric typing, when I switched. Learning to use the meta key was easy when I was learning to use ctrl (next to it) and backspace (next to that) at the same time.
(Yes, with ctrl-alt-backspace all in a line under my thumb I've been
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 8, 2009 21:48 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (Yes, with ctrl-alt-backspace all in a line under my thumb...I smell a Stones parody in there somewhere...
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 9, 2009 4:39 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I smell a Stones parody in there somewhere... Well, I have little Sympathy for the Devil who insists on shortening the rope too much. Don't they realize that You Can't Always Get What You Want? It's bad enough that I Can't Get No Satisfaction with all these extra X server options, and no one else wants to come to my Emotional Rescue when my X session is Shattered. My computer is a Beast of Burden; I cannot just Let It Bleed. All I ask is that the developers Gimme Shelter from too short a rope. As for the bike shed (discussed by Thue below), why not just Paint It, Black?
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 17, 2009 8:05 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Not an intentional one, but it's nice watching people run with it :)
Meta Key Posted Apr 6, 2009 2:38 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
"I think the last time I touched an actual meta key was on a DECStation
keyboard in the early 90s"
What, no Windows keyboard for you?
I map the Windows-logo key to Meta, since it sure looks to me like the
Meta Key Posted Apr 9, 2009 5:44 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Strictly speaking, X has no 'modifier code' for Alt (though it can be mapped as a separate modifier via vmods), which is why Meta is generally used.
Meta Key Posted Apr 17, 2009 12:31 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]
There are eight modifier flags, three of which have permanent meaning (shift, control, and
capslock). So really those are the only ones which are guaranteed to exist on every X server.
Meta, Alt, Hyper, Super, etc. can be mapped to any of the other five if those keysyms (or left or
My experience is that this stuff isn't very well documented and certain applications interpret things
Utility of ctrl-alt-backspace Posted Apr 17, 2009 11:51 UTC (Fri) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]
I'm also a big use of the X server kill keystroke. I use it as a really fast logout mechanism all the
time. Of course I could change to another key sequence (though it wouldn't work when the screen is locked), and I guess I will have to.
The bigger problem in X server and application bugs. There's no easy way to work around them
Really, I'd like to see the X protocol extended so grabs weren't needed as often, and so there was
The X server going into a catatonic state (or crashing, but at least then you can login and restart
So, in summary, I hate to see this go without a replacement. Someone mentioned that Sun
Utility of ctrl-alt-backspace Posted Apr 17, 2009 21:39 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
In the case of a keyboard grab, you can just switch to a virtual terminal
and kill the offending program (all toolkits popups use grabs so program freezing with menu open e.g. to network timeout is pretty bad). That releases the client's pointer/keyboard/server grab.
This helps only to grabs though, if X itself freezes, you cannot do the VT
Shortening the rope Posted Apr 4, 2009 6:26 UTC (Sat) by SimonKagstrom (subscriber, #49801) [Link]
I've also used Emacs for a long time, but I've managed to Zap X a number of times from within it. It's not really emacs fault since I've numerous times done the same from shells etc - Meta-backspace very conveniently deletes a word backwards.
Unfortunately, Ctrl and Alt are neighbors and placing fat fingers carelessly sometimes means *Zap* and all work lost. Adding DontZap is always one of the first things I do on a new desktop. First I open a lot of windows and perform a lot of work there, then Zap the desktop by mistake, and then remember to add DontZap.
Personally, I don't care what the default is - I know how to change it and have never seen as that much of a problem (most things get better if you have to redo them once!).
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