What is hijacking Konsole?

[Duncan]

Dotan Cohen posted on Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:58:33 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 02:18, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan at cox.net> wrote:

>> You indicate Ctrl-F, upper-case F.  [T]here's some doubt as to whether
>> you mean Ctrl-Shift-F or simply ctrl-f.
>>
>> I'm assuming ctrl-f
>>
> You bring up a good point. I do mean lower-case F, I use the upper-case
> letter when mentioning the shortcut because א) it is easier to discern
> an upper-case letter by itself, ב) that is what the Konsole shortcuts
> menu shows, and ג) that is what is written on the keyboard! In my
> opinion using upper-case F would be a triple whammy and deserving of the
> full Ctrl-Shift-F name!

I agree and would likely use Ctrl-F here too, but imagine the frustration 
of 5-10 levels of replies... before it's discovered that the two sides 
aren't even talking about the same shortcut!

After a few years of list and (news)group based troubleshooting one tends 
to learn to play "spot the assumption" and enumerate them to the degree 
possible in the first couple levels of replies.  Often the logic tree 
branches so heavily that the first reply or two are either very long (my 
tendency), artificially stubbed  (I'll do this too, but generally only 
with what I judge to be the lower likelihood candidates), or short, but 
full of unproven assumptions that must all match up or it's simply multi-
hundred-possibility scattershot.

What's the most frustrating, tho, are posts that simply don't contain 
enough data to even begin to attack the problem.  If it's going to be 
three levels in before the problem domain can even begin to be 
defined...  Fortunately, those aren't so common, but they do appear.  I'm 
thinking of one guy, a medical Doctor IIRC, who might have been quite 
skilled indeed in the medical domain, but who just did /not/ understand 
what I'd consider even quite basic computer domain material.  What made 
it worse was that this guy, clearly out of his depth, was running Gentoo, 
and would come back time after time to the Gentoo lists with various 
questions.  After about the fifth time of 20+ level deep discussions 
before the problem is resolved, 10+ level deep before it's even 
reasonably defined, one really begins to wonder how in the world they 
ended up on a power user distro like gentoo in the first place.  But at 
the same time, I had to give the guy major points for persistence.  I can 
only hope if I ever come down with some rare disease that I get a doctor 
so doggedly persistent!  But, we generally did resolve whatever issue he 
was posting about... eventually.

I've not seen anything from that guy in a few years tho.  Perhaps he 
finally did decide that Ubuntu or the like was more appropriate for him 
than Gentoo, as it seemed to me surely must be the case.

Meanwhile, I appreciate your Hebrew touch (and the fact that it "just 
works" here, too, no unknown-glyph squares, etc, that it even works is 
still a marvel to me). =:^)

>> it's a reasonably safe deduction

> Yes, I did get this far. I checked in a new Konsole with nothing running
> in it. That much I did not see fit to share but maybe I should have.

Just covering the bases.  As I said, better in the first reply than 
getting five levels in, only to find out we're barking up the wrong 
tree... on a possibility that could have been eliminated several rounds 
earlier if we'd thought to cover it.

>> 4) Similarly, consider file associations[.]  It's quite possible that
>> whatever's getting triggered is from a broken file association,
>> possibly of a mis-parsed longer command that would normally be
>> launching something /in/ xterm, but being broken...  Again, this
>> wouldn't be a kde default association as that would be konsole instead
>> of xterm, but consider libre office / OOo associations, for instance,
>> as well as (again) non-kde media players, etc.
>>
> That is one that I did not think to check. Thanks.

Chalk that suggestion up to specific experience.  That's why I was so 
specific with the LO/OOo example, as someone posted a problem not long 
ago that turned out to be exactly that, a broken LO/OOo association and 
the rather strange and unexpected behavior that resulted!  As I don't 
have it installed that would have been pretty far down my list of 
possibilities and it was fortunate coincidence that connection was 
found.  But once found, it definitely got put on my list of possibilities 
to check for, as this clearly demonstrates. =:^)

>> 5) Does ctrl-f behave as expected in non-konsole X-based apps?  In
>> kwrite, for instance, and konqueror, ctrl-f should trigger a find,
>> by default.
>>
>>
> Actually, only after I posted did I even think to check of Ctrl-F's
> behaviour in other apps! For me it is a given that Ctrl-F is Find,so
> ingrained that I wouldn't even need to check it universally. I was naive
> and young then!

Ahh, those personal assumptions so deeply embedded that one is entirely 
blind to even their very existence!

Spotting and challenging that specific sort of assumption blindness seems 
to be a particular strength of newsgroups/mailinglists, a fact that 
probably goes quite some way toward explaining why I'm so addicted to 
'em, given the rare chance they offer to look into that otherwise hidden 
to me, but transparent to others, side of myself, and to watch the same 
process of self-discovery as it happens to others as well. =:^)

> The truth is, I would have never found it if Zorael had not mentioned
> it. I had set up and used xbindkeys so long ago and stopped using it in
> my previous install. For some reason (I think that I know why, actually)
> it got reenabled in the new install but with this default config that
> had never popped up before. I would have never located that.

That's another strength of newsgroups/mailinglists.  Get a few people 
together on a list/group, and it's astonishing just how many strange 
corner-cases are covered between the lot of 'em! =:^)

Meanwhile, I can chalk that up as another benefit to Gentoo, as well.  I 
too tried xbindkeys as an alternative solution to khotkeys, when the 
latter lost multi-key functionality with kde4.  But while I too had quit 
using it, the fact that every installed package on gentoo brings with it 
the higher continuing maintenance cost of rebuilding the package for 
every version upgrade and occasionally for library dependencies and 
toolchain upgrades such as gcc as well, STRONGLY encourages one to 
properly uninstall packages one isn't actually using.  So as soon as I 
decided it wasn't what I needed, it was uninstalled, leaving no 
opportunity for problems like the one you just had to come back and bite 
me. =:^)

(Actually, IIRC I had never properly added it to my installed list in the 
first place.  So it was effectively only installed on a trial basis, and 
since I routinely run an installation cleaner that lists such potential 
deadwood and offers to remove it, until I decided whether to keep it or 
not, it was in "package purgatory", impossible for me to forget since it 
constantly appeared on the uninstall candidate listing.  It's a nice 
system to have as it tends to keep one out of whole hosts of trouble. =:^)

> Thank you for the insightful troubleshooting methodology! We have
> similar style, but you are without a doubt more thorough and careful!

As I said, the credit for that goes to all my years of group/list 
troubleshooting.  That has undoubtedly honed my skills and bettered my 
own system management as well as helping avoid the occasional multi-level 
rabbit-trail on the lists and groups. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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