Setting keyboard repeat rate...

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Mon Mar 12 01:29:32 EDT 2007


On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 22:48 -0500, Brian Chabot wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, Brian Chabot wrote:
> 
> > Anyone know how to reset the keyboard repeat rate under a current 
> > Mandriva/redhat-like system?
> 
> I got it fixed in KDE... haven't had a need to go into a console yet.
> 
> It's just... odd that it would get that sensitive.  Made typing and 
> passwords awkward.
> 
This reminded me of an issue that occurred many years ago with trying to
write a script that would allow one computer to dial up another computer
and send it "commands", as if they were being typed in.  Hey, it was a
crazy time, and we did crazy things.

Everything was working fine until we upped the transmission rate.  Then,
even though hand-shaking was going on in the modems, things began to
break down.

When we looked into it we found out that the editor that was accepting
some of these commands allowed special keys to be set that would
generate multiple characters on one keystroke as a "macro name", and
which the editor would happy take and do something with.  As long as the
characters were coming in at "normal typing speed" the editor was fine,
but as you bumped up the rate the editor decided "these two characters
could not possibly be coming in from a typist, it must be a key sending
two characters as a macro", and go off on doing whatever it thought that
macro-designation was telling it to do.

So we slowed the bps rate back to a slower rate and everything was fine.
The programmer who wrote the editor decided that maybe time-based macro
detection was not the thing to do.

As I said, crazy times.

md



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