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Ctrl-]

Filed under: General — Thomas @ 21:03

2007-04-02
21:03

 Just spent an hour trying to figure out why Ctrl-] in my gnome-terminal zooms the window instead of sending a telnet escape character. I was connected with a xen console and wanted to detach so I could reattach from home later.

I still don't have it figured out, and I'm still not sure it's gnome-terminal, GNOME itself, or something else.

xev correctly lists the key being pressed as rightbracket. Zoom mode is bound to Ctrl-+, which on my current US keyboard is shared with the = key. So, in gnome-terminal, Ctrl-] behaves the same as Ctrl-=

In Firefox, Ctrl-] does not zoom, and Ctrl-= does zoom.

Now, when I remap gnome-terminal's Zoom out to Ctrl-= (and not Ctrl-+, which while on the same key is a different symbol), then Ctrl-] *does* work as expected. Confused yet ?

This can only be a special casing in gnome-terminal afaict. Anyone know for sure before I start digging through gnome-terminal code again ?

As an aside, I can apparently use Ctrl-5 instead... This is according to the Xen wiki and that seems to work for me.

I will save my complaints about Xen for some other day :)

UPDATE:  People have commnented on the GTK+ "bug" at the heart of this.  Yes, I have two layouts defined: an English one, and a Spanish one.  This is because I switched keyboards last week.  No, none of them are Dvorak.  I find the bug report baffling - an argument is being made in favour of Hebrew/Russian/... languages but nobody seems to explain exactly what the problem is.  I have no idea what a Russian keyboard looks like and why it is impossible to type certain things on it.

5 Comments »

  1. Are you using two Latin keyboard layouts?

    Is it this bug? http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162726

    Comment by Alex Jones — 2007-04-02 @ 21:42

  2. That’s because you have Dvorak keyboard layout in use. In Dvorak layout, ‘[‘ and ‘]’ are on ‘-‘ and ‘=’ keys (on QWERTY) and GTK+ checks all user’s layouts to match the keystroke. Just remove the Dvorak layout to solve the problem.

    There are many reports on bgo and many of them have been close as NOTABUG.

    And here are the bmo report to get Ctrl+] not working on firefox:
    [Bug 69230] Accelerators should not be affected by keyboard group/level

    ;)

    Comment by Behnam "ZWNJ" — 2007-04-02 @ 22:59

  3. If you’ve got multiple keyboard layouts enabled, it could cause this. I’ve got Dvorak as my primary layout and US English as my secondary, but when something is unbound (in GTK) in the current layout but bound in the secondary layout, it will act as if the second layout is active. So since Ctrl-] in dvorak is the same as Ctrl-+ in Qwerty, and Ctrl-+ is bound to zoom, Gnome-terminal zooms.

    This is a really old GTK bug that’s been bothering me for ages. One solution is to just only have one layout active, but then you can’t switch between the two. If it’s only bothering you for this particular binding, just use rxvt for Xen or something.

    Comment by Phil Hagelberg — 2007-04-02 @ 23:04

  4. Hmmm. I encounter a similar bug because I type dvorak. On a standard dvorak layout =/+ is the right bracket and the right bracket is the =/+ key.

    Sorry I can’t help at all, but it’s strange to have that problem with what I assume is a qwerty layout.

    Comment by sjs — 2007-04-02 @ 23:11

  5. I can also confirm this with the Dvorak layout. In some Eclipse versions/installations, pressing Ctrl-C (Copy text) will type Ctrl-I (Indent IIRC), making the editor almost unusable except in Emacs keybinding mode. Really annoying. Are the GTK guys aware of this? I don’t understand the comment above that there are many related bugs closed as NOTABUG. Comment 3 above seems like a good definition of the problem.

    Comment by Luke — 2007-04-03 @ 05:02

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