Joonas Sarajärvi wrote:
2009/3/28 Gerry Reno <greno@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
The traditional three-keystroke combination
of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace has been
working successfully for decades. There is absolutely nothing wrong with
this keysequence. It is one of the most unlikely keysequences that a
general X user is ever going to hit accidentally. It is only the tiny Emacs
community with their very similar keystroke combinations that has ever had
any problems with accidentally tripping this keystroke combination. And
it's not fair to the general Xorg community that a historical
well-understood and expected default should be disabled all in the interest
of one tiny subcommunity.
My support for support the X.org developers' decision isn't due to my
Emacs usage. I just think it's a better design to not have the Zap
function enabled as default.
I think leaving the zap function disabled is very much in line with
the general character of Fedora. In past, we have many times replaced
old, de-facto ways of doing things with new, innovative solutions and
decision. In Fedora 10, the default vt for X was changed from vt 1 to
vt 7, despite many arguments similar to yours, and despite that it
could potentially confuse some experienced users. Especially now that
this isn't even a Fedora decision but an upstream one, it would in my
opinion seem a bit odd if Fedora did override that decision. The X
developers seem to think that the system should work so well that
there would be no need for a magic key combo for killing the server. I
think that's quite optimistic and forward-looking, which is mindset
that Fedora also happens to follow quite often.
The change regarding the default vt made sense since it made the whole
vt keystroke sequence more sensible. The change with regard to default
setting for Ctrl-Alt-Backspace does not make sense. The default
setting has not been causing anyone any problems outside of the tiny
Emacs community. And the Emacs community as I said can create their
own special xorg.conf file to deal with their special keystroke
combination conflict. And please, Xorg changing the default is not
some forward-looking thing in any way. It is nothing more than a
special interest implementation for a tiny subcommunity that ends up
impacting sysadmins and creating additional work for them and increases
demands on time and resources.
I don't
know any perfect solutions, but in my opinion, it is good that some of
the most obtrusive shortcuts are already (possibly) getting a
non-default status.
While I haven't lost any important work due to X.org zapping, I fail
to see why a modern graphics system should have many keyboard
shortcuts itself in such prominent places.
I am also an Emacs user, though I haven't yet figured what control in
Emacs is close to ctrl-alt-backspace. Maybe it's the Finnish layout
that has something positioned more favourably...
Try Ctrl-Alt-End or Ctrl-Alt-\. Emacs users can easily mistakenly type
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace when attempting these keystrokes especially on laptops.
But again, that doesn't mean we need to change default behaviors. What it
means is that the Emacs community needs to prepare special xorg.conf entries
for their purpose of disabling Ctrl-Alt-Backspace for them and not pushing a
huge change on the massive overall Xorg community.
I haven't probably ever used those commands in Emacs.
Well there are plenty of Emacs users who do use those commands and who
are having the conflict problem with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
Regards,
Gerry
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