weird problem with 'win' key

[Andriy Gapon]

On 03/05/2020 15:58, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Saturday, 2 May 2020 21:59:50 CEST Andriy Gapon wrote:
>> I have a pretty weird problem with the 'Windows' key in KDE / plasma5.
>> This is a fresh installation with pretty much a default configuration.
>> I do not think that I have seen such a problem before.
>> Also, using other window managers / desktop environments I do not see the
>> same problem.
> 
> I see the same thing on my local desktop: xev recognizes the key, I can even 
> use it to configure shortcuts **but** it behaves weirdly, and none of the 
> shortcuts using the key are recognized. (Not even showing plasma launcher)
> 
> er .. now that I've written that, and messed around with global shortcuts 
> settings for a bit, win (recognized as meta) **does** show the launcher, meta-
> L (configured explictly) **does** show the launcher, but alt-F1 (shown in the 
> configuration as "show launcher") doesn't.

I think I found a problem, maybe someone will recognize a root cause behind it.

I looked at .config/kglobalshortcutsrc and found some entries that looked
weirdly different from the rest. Here they are:
display=Display,Display\tMeta+P,Switch Display
Lock Session=Meta+L,Meta+L\tCtrl+Alt+L\tScreensaver,Lock Session
ExposeAll=Ctrl+F10,Ctrl+F10\tLaunch (C),Toggle Present Windows (All desktops)

As you can see all of them contain "\t" (two characters) substring in them.
Also, there are more key specifications than then the expected two (if we
consider that both "," and "\t" are valid separators, which is not a fact).

So, I shut down plasma and, to be 100% sure, killed all processes belonging to
the user id.  Then I edited kglobalshortcutsrc using a text editor and turned
those entries into this:
display=Display,Meta+P,Switch Display
Lock Session=Meta+L,Ctrl+Alt+L,Lock Session
ExposeAll=Ctrl+F10,Launch (C),Toggle Present Windows (All desktops)

These are more regular, they use just commas as separators and specify just two
keys (a default and a custom).

To my big surprise, after I started plasma again those entries were reverted
back to the initial form.  I thought that I made a mistake, so I repeated the
process a couple of times and each time I got the same result.

Then, I started plasma and executed 'kquitapp5 kglobalaccel'.  Then I edited the
file again.  And then started kglobalaccel5.
This time my modifications stayed unchanged.  At least, while the session is
still running.
And! Win+L now locked the screen, Win+D showed the desktop, Win+E launched
Dolphin, etc!

But after I restarted plasma (logout + login), the strange entries came back and
the Meta shortcuts got broken.

So, what's creating those broken shortcuts and why it's so persistent?

-- 
Andriy Gapon