Please revert Xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Sat Mar 28 10:42:23 PDT 2009


On 28 Mar 2009, David Miller said:

> From: Gerry Reno <greno at verizon.net>
> Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:01:46 -0400
>
>> Yes, this was all discussed in the thread.  Of course you can put
>> things in xorg.conf.  So revert this huge change and let the
>> relatively small community of Emacs users put whatever they need in
>> xorg.conf and thereby you don't end up changing default behavior for
>> the entire overall Linux community and that has been counted on by
>> users and sysadmins for near forever.
>
> emacs users don't typically have permissions to modify xorg.conf,
> whereas sysadmins do

Also, who the hell relies on this behaviour? Nobody that I know of.
It's very occasionally useful if you only have one machine and X has
frozen but has *not* crashed nor locked up the whole box, but this
is exceptionally rare: the grab-breaking keys are much more often
useful (and even they are useful so rarely that I can never remember
what they are when I need to use them).

If you happen to be using a system so unstable that forcibly killing X
from the keyboard is a useful behaviour, then turn DontZap off again.
Changing one line in a config file is *not* a catastrophically hard
change for you to make.

(Oh, and, btw, my mother once killed X accidentally thanks to this
feature, and I can guarantee that she is *not* an Emacs user! This
really did hurt random users, and gave X a slight impression of
instability: "you can crash it with a keystroke", sort of thing.)

-- 
`We must stand together and fight for our shared cultural heritage as a
 group of people who cannot stand together to fight for our shared
 cultural heritage.' --- jspaleta on Balkan balkanization


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