Shortening the rope [LWN.net]

Shortening the rope

Posted Apr 4, 2009 10:07 UTC (Sat) by stefanor (subscriber, #32895)
Parent article: Shortening the rope

I'm one of the people who complained.

In particular, I find the default GNOME workspace-changing keypresses (Ctrl-Alt-Arrows) are too similar to Kill X. I think that default benign keypresses shouldn't be so similar to such dangerous ones.

Obviously people can reconfigure they GNOME/Emacs keypresses, but I consciously try to use the defaults (and get them changed where necessary), so that I don't get to out of touch with the defaults that I'm unable to use other people's computers.

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Shortening the rope

Posted Apr 7, 2009 18:28 UTC (Tue) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

Come on, how is Ctrl-Alt-BkSPC different from Ctrl-Alt-DEL? In fact, Ctrl-Alt-DEL is much closer to the arrow keys on most keyboards. If you're going to complain against Ctrl-Alt-BkSPC zapping the X server, you should at least present a strong argument against it.

Here's one: people often type Alt-BkSPC because of GNU readline defaults, and emacs defaults. Ctrl and Alt are next to each other on many keyboards, and thus easy to press together by mistake.

Now, THAT is a good reason to revisit using a single press of Ctrl-Alt-BkSPC to zap the X server.

Shortening the rope

Posted Apr 7, 2009 19:58 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah, but that just makes you a member of the 'tiny minority' of Emacs
users, and GNU bash users, and GNOME users, and, oh, wait.

(I was particularly amused by the claim from the same guy that the X
developers were all Emacs users, even those who'd said 'btw, I use vim',
because they had *not explicitly disclaimed using Emacs*. So therefore
they were members of a *secret community* of *closeted Emacs users* who
were holding *secret votes* to disenfranchise the enormous community of
people who use VMs which run X and have to have X regularly force-killed
via menus that programmatically hit C-A-BS in the VM and can't be manually
configured and aren't kickstarted and can't have packages installed on
them.

It is obvious to any idiot that this latter community is *much much*
larger than the community of Emacs and bash and GNOME users.)