I’ve written about this before, but Ctrl-Alt-workspace switching key-presses nail me routinely.

Let’s go through some history:

We have Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the “three-fingered-salute”, meaning reboot, right? That combination was designed to NEVER be pressed by accident. And it never used to be.

The X guys needed a kill-X key-press, as things can sometimes get broken in X. So they chose Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, which is also a pretty sensible combination. It’s very similar to Ctrl-Alt-Delete, so we remember it, and backspace has milder connotations than delete, so we understand it to mean that it’ll only kill a part of the system.

X also has some other Ctl-Alt- shortcuts. Some of these are also suitably obscure, i.e. NumPad+ and NumPad-. Others like Ctrl-Alt-F1 mean change to virtual console 1. That one might do by accident, if you are an old WordPerfect user, but should be safe enough otherwise. They were designed to look like big brothers of (and even work as) standard VT-changing behaviour.

For changing workspaces, Alt-F1 style key-presses were used, mimicing VT-changing key-presses. This is great for *nix users, but people coming from Windows expect Alt-F4 to close a program, not take them to workspace 4.

So GNOME came along, and decided that instead, they’d use Ctrl-Alt-Arrow key-presses to change workspace. That’s fine, but it’s a pretty common action, so I’m often holding down Ctrl-Alt without even thinking about it. If I start editing something and press delete/backspace, before I’ve released Ctrl-Alt, boom! And I run screaming and write a blog post.

Now, I know that Ctl-Alt-{Delete,Backspace} can be disabled (even if the latter is a little tricky to do), but I’d really like to change them. I like to be able to kill X without using another machine and ssh, I just don’t like this to happen by accident. And no, the solution isn’t for me to change my workspace-changing keys, because this problem must affect every GNOME user, not just me.

Dangerous key-presses should be really unlikely key-presses. Alt-SysRq- key-presses are good in this regard, they’ll always be unlikely. (Oh, and they are insanely useful.)

This might sound like a silly topic, but it’s infuriating.

It’s only very recently (since July) that I’ve adopted the Ctrl-Alt-Arrow Virtual Desktop bindings. Call me an old todger, but up until now, I’ve always remapped Alt-F1 through Alt-F6 as my Virtual Desktop keys. That’s how I always switched desktop, and I couldn’t bring myself to change to the Ctrl-Alt style.

I try to slowly align myself with the new defaults, so that I have to do less customisation to feel comfortable when I sit down at a box. With the MacBook which infuriatingly requires Fn+ for the F-keys, I thought I’d switch. It took a bit of re-training to switch, and now I’m comfortable. But, every now an then, I accidentally press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and kill X. This combination is supposed to be highly unlikely to be accidental, and used to be. But with the default gnome bindings, it’s quite common. You just finish editing some text, and switch desktop, to find that your right hand hadn’t fully released the backspace key before the Ctrl+Alt went down.

I think either the X kill key needs to be changed, or we have to get rid of this silly gnome desktop-switching binding.

OTOH, I’m almost entirely in line with the modern GNOME defaults. On a foreign machine, I need to set up Dvorak keyboard, change the terminal to grey-on-black, and I’m pretty much ready to go. (My .ssh/config is also nice to have, as are my firefox quick links)