xterm tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

xterm tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

[Frank Eske]

If the tab key is entered as the first character running the bash shell on
an xterm terminal, the keyboard temporarily locks. Control-C writes ^C but
doesn't unlock it. This doesn't happen on Fedora. It also doesn't lock if a
space is typed first.

This occurs whether or not the xterm console is in an X environment.

For some reason I seem to accidentally do this a lot more often than I'd
like, so it's a real nuisance. I checked this mailing list for the last
four months and couldn't find " tab" or a useful "tab ", I find it
difficult to believe that I'm the first to see this, so maybe there's
something I changed that's making this happen. Any advice on what that
might be?

Re: xterm tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

[Brian Inglis]

On 2020-10-18 12:07, Frank Eske via Cygwin wrote:
> If the tab key is entered as the first character running the bash shell on
> an xterm terminal, the keyboard temporarily locks. Control-C writes ^C but
> doesn't unlock it. This doesn't happen on Fedora. It also doesn't lock if a
> space is typed first.
> 
> This occurs whether or not the xterm console is in an X environment.
> 
> For some reason I seem to accidentally do this a lot more often than I'd
> like, so it's a real nuisance. I checked this mailing list for the last
> four months and couldn't find " tab" or a useful "tab ", I find it
> difficult to believe that I'm the first to see this, so maybe there's
> something I changed that's making this happen. Any advice on what that
> might be?

Bash command completion is searching for commands to display - you will
eventually get asked if you want to "Display all 4587 possibilities? (y or n)"
(or similar number) after it has loaded all executable names from all
directories in your PATH!

Also beware of typing tab after /tmp/, /var/log/, /var/cache/.../, or running ls
on those without -U (unordered) if you are as tidy as I am.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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Re: xterm tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

[Adam Dinwoodie]

On Sun, 18 Oct 2020 at 19:23, Brian Inglis wrote:
>
> On 2020-10-18 12:07, Frank Eske via Cygwin wrote:
> > If the tab key is entered as the first character running the bash shell on
> > an xterm terminal, the keyboard temporarily locks. Control-C writes ^C but
> > doesn't unlock it. This doesn't happen on Fedora. It also doesn't lock if a
> > space is typed first.
> >
> > This occurs whether or not the xterm console is in an X environment.
> >
> > For some reason I seem to accidentally do this a lot more often than I'd
> > like, so it's a real nuisance. I checked this mailing list for the last
> > four months and couldn't find " tab" or a useful "tab ", I find it
> > difficult to believe that I'm the first to see this, so maybe there's
> > something I changed that's making this happen. Any advice on what that
> > might be?
>
> Bash command completion is searching for commands to display - you will
> eventually get asked if you want to "Display all 4587 possibilities? (y or n)"
> (or similar number) after it has loaded all executable names from all
> directories in your PATH!

There are a few things that can make this particularly painful:

- Your Cygwin environment inheriting a large PATH from Windows, so it
needs to search through a lot of directories.

- The PATH containing network shares, especially if some of those
network shares are relatively slow.

You can check what's currently in your PATH by just running `echo
$PATH`. There's lots of different ways of resolving this, but probably
the easiest is to reset your PATH by adding something like `export
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin` to
your ~/.bashrc file.

Re: xterm tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

[Frank Eske]

There may be some other key or key combination on the left side of the
keyboard that's doing this also. While the tab key can reproducibly cause
it, some other key combination might also.

Since my bash version is Jan 27, 2017 and none of my .bash scripts have
changed recently, xterm (Sep 20, 2020) seems like the most likely culprit.
I did create a .fonts file for experimentation which is just now removed.
(It's too early to tell whether that somehow created this problem.)

On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 2:07 PM Frank Eske <fne.bugzilla@gmail.com> wrote:

> If the tab key is entered as the first character running the bash shell on
> an xterm terminal, the keyboard temporarily locks. Control-C writes ^C but
> doesn't unlock it. This doesn't happen on Fedora. It also doesn't lock if a
> space is typed first.
>
> This occurs whether or not the xterm console is in an X environment.
>
> For some reason I seem to accidentally do this a lot more often than I'd
> like, so it's a real nuisance. I checked this mailing list for the last
> four months and couldn't find " tab" or a useful "tab ", I find it
> difficult to believe that I'm the first to see this, so maybe there's
> something I changed that's making this happen. Any advice on what that
> might be?
>
>
>

Re: tab key (temporarily) locks keyboard

[Thomas Wolff]

Please don't "top-post" here.

Am 21.10.2020 um 19:45 schrieb Frank Eske via Cygwin:
> There may be some other key or key combination on the left side of the
> keyboard that's doing this also. While the tab key can reproducibly cause
> it, some other key combination might also.
>
> Since my bash version is Jan 27, 2017 and none of my .bash scripts have
> changed recently, xterm (Sep 20, 2020) seems like the most likely culprit.
> I did create a .fonts file for experimentation which is just now removed.
> (It's too early to tell whether that somehow created this problem.)
The issue has been explained and it's not related to xterm.

>
> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 2:07 PM Frank Eske <fne.bugzilla@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If the tab key is entered as the first character running the bash shell on
>> an xterm terminal, the keyboard temporarily locks. Control-C writes ^C but
>> doesn't unlock it. This doesn't happen on Fedora. It also doesn't lock if a
>> space is typed first.
>>
>> This occurs whether or not the xterm console is in an X environment.
>>
>> For some reason I seem to accidentally do this a lot more often than I'd
>> like, so it's a real nuisance. I checked this mailing list for the last
>> four months and couldn't find " tab" or a useful "tab ", I find it
>> difficult to believe that I'm the first to see this, so maybe there's
>> something I changed that's making this happen. Any advice on what that
>> might be?
>>
>>
>>
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