Idea #11663: Restart X11 by taping Crtl + alt + backspace twince

Written by voncarlsson the 30 Jul 08 at 19:36. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

Don't you hate when you by mistake press crtl + alt + backspace at the same time? And everything you are working on just disappear you don't even have to save.

Now why don't do like fedora, make taping crtl + alt + backspace once make a sound so you know that you have pressed it and if you press crtl + alt + backspace twice you restart X11.

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Attachments

Blueprint xorg-ctrl-alt-backspace: Ubuntu

Duplicates

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Comments

jrusinek wrote on the 30 Jul 08 at 21:06

openSUSE does that by default too. the settings is called ZapWarning. try it out (in ServerFlags of xorg.conf, if you know what I'm talking about).

jschuurk wrote on the 30 Jul 08 at 21:21

Now I'm curious: when you accidentally tap ctrl+alt+bckspce, what are you trying to do? What key combination where you aiming for?
(Not that I think it's a bad idea, so no vote up or down from me.)

anabelle wrote on the 30 Jul 08 at 22:11

yes please

Auzy wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 00:55

I have to mark this as -1 unfortunately (it needs improvement, but I like the idea).

For starters, I don't see any way that you could accidentally press that key combination (unless you have a weird keyboard). But I will assume they wanted ctrl+alt+~ (which is possible).

In terms of feedback, making a sound will just confuse people and cause them to think its jammed. They would not immediately realize that they need to press it twice.

Instead, why not post another idea, where a warning is shown on the screen that "pressing Enter, will cause X11 to restart. Or press Esc to continue work without restarting".

elisee wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 07:30

There's already a blueprint (that I just attached) and quite a lot of discussion going on on this subject.

asdasd wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 10:35

@Auzy: Actually, it already happened to me once or twice. Can't remember what exactly I was trying to do, but I think it's just too easy to accidentally press Backspace. Maybe I wanted Ctrl+Alt+Return, or F12, Insert, Delete... Anyway the point is that there should be a safeguard of some kind, killing X out of accident can be a disaster.

But, it has to be something that doesn't require reading and confirming some dialogbox, since in some cases one has to kill X because of black/corrupted screens or similar situations where it isn't working properly.

Auzy wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 10:37

Just saying, it needs feedback. We should try to present as much feedback as possible

jcastro (Ubuntu Developer) wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 14:42

Pretty sure this is coming in Intrepid, but not 100% sure.

asdir wrote on the 31 Jul 08 at 15:18

If the beep confuses people, a simple message could appear the first time it happens. It would be one of those messages that do not appear again unless the user wants it to.

pengo wrote on the 5 Aug 08 at 23:04

Yes, it's happened to me too. I don't know what Compiz or Photoshop inspired combination I was reaching for, but I've hit ctrl-alt-backspace by accident too.

angrykeyboarder wrote on the 6 Aug 08 at 06:53

"Don't you hate when you by mistake press crtl + alt + backspace at the same time?"

I suppose if I did this, I would hate it, but it's pretty hard to pull off. Therefore, I don't.

kf7xm wrote on the 11 Aug 08 at 19:05

Some of us who make regular use of a KVM to
connect several computers to a single keyboard
often send control sequences by error. The
reason that I never use Redhat any more is
the number of times that I have hit
in order to log in to a
Windows box, and a Redhat server obediently
shut itself down because I forgot that the
KVM was switched to it.

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