After getting a comment from the creator of kanata (an awesome piece of software by the way) that he found my story amusing, I figured that I’d also post it here, partly as fun, partly as a cautionary tale. Also, I’d appreciate any tips as to what to check for in my system, it’s a weird feeling to know that some stuff might have been messed up under the hood.
OP is literally the dude running the strange setup in the age olld, “this should be a solution that anyone can use, no one can be running THAT strange of a setup”.
Because ortholinear split keyboards aren’t that easy to come by (I got tired of confusing my fingers when reaching for letters between them, now there is no “between”, just straight columns. Also, I can hold my hands at shoulder width!), on the other hand this was an option I had all the necessary hardware for, and with some software configuration it is actually really usable!
(The question could potentially also be “Why aren’t more people using two numpads as a keyboard?”, but I guess that the answer would be somewhere between they don’t care about and they don’t know about the advantages it would provide. 🙃)
Seriously though, limiting the macro length to something reasonable should work, but it’s also guaranteed to make some people mad. I’m sure there’s at least one user who is working on something absurdly obscure that requires a macro long enough to reach beyond the edge of the observable universe.
My solution is to make the default behavior sensible, while proving a special option for that one guy. Just limit it for the average user, but not for everyone.
Well you make that adjustable with infinite being one of the choices. Set it to a default of something like 25 and let the user increase if they need to.
That’s fun and also horrifying. Consider the fact that your keyboard history likely has your password it. You could end up running sudo commands and authorizing things unintentionally
Fucking Gskill keyboard has the same issue. Maco recording buttons that are up near escape so I’d hit record without knowing it, then sometime later I’d replay it all. After the second time I just ripped the whole button off the keyboard.
I once left my phone non locked in my pocket once and it started typing a ton of gibberish in a serious group chat. So yep, could’ve been worse for you
Does Ctrl+Alt+Backspace not kill X any more (assuming you’re using X)?
Does Ctrl+Alt+Delete reboot the system from a graphical desktop? Or is that only from the virtual consoles?
I wonder if locking the session would have stopped it as well. I doubt the Alt+SysRq combos would have been useful since other random input was happening at the same time (unless the next keystroke happened to be an I, U, or B).
1.) I’m using wayland (river as a compositor at this point), and have not set up a key combo for riverctl exit in fear of an accidental trigger, but it might actually be a good idea.
2.) As far as I know, that only applies to the VTTYs.
3.) Setting up a screen locker program does seem like a good option for preventing unwanted input (which can occur for other reasons as well, such as my one year old son 😀) without potential loss of work / data! Is swaylock the go to solution for this nowadays?
River looks nice, I use bspwm for years now and always was in search of another highly configurable wm/compositor for Wayland. I hate the i3/sway way of doing things i.e. beeing very opinionated while pretending not to and doing things almost like a DE.
On first glance this seems to be it! With riverctl replacing bspc. It even allows external programs for the layout and the config is by default just a shell script.
Are there any known issues you encountered or quirks? Would you recommend it to me?
River is actually really nice! I have been a Sway user for multiple years before, but as it reached parity with i3, it was deemed “feature complete” (which is reasonable, as it was made to be a drop-in replacement), so I switched to Hyprland, but after making a small contribution I found the development too chaotic, so I started looking for something else.
I have been really happy with River. It still has some small shortcomings (e.g. minor visual glitches with fullscreening, and some less used options still missing), but the developers are very responsive on IRC (which I’m actually not a huge fan of, this was the first time I had to use it, but it’s OK for what it is) and it being written in Zig is a huge selling point for me, as I don’t have to write any C or C++ to extend it (my first PR is already on the way) when something I’d like to do is not yet possible.
If you’re willing to spend a while getting to know it and setting up the environment (it relies on external programs for some functionality that is built-in in other compositors, such as monitor management), then I’d definitely say that it’s worth a shot!
This sounds exactly what I’m searching for then. Besides that I don’t know Zig and would prefer C/C++ I only hear good or familiar things. Bspwm is also not the most bug free wm when it comes to visual glitches.
Also not beeing so monolithic and relying on external programs is actually a major plus point for me. Actually I really dislike how Wayland (or rather most compositor implementations) fused everything into one project.
Damn. In the old days, I would have yanked the power cable out, but I probably wouldn’t remember powering off the laptop either. Kudos for posting about it though.
Just reading, my first instinct was, “Yank the fucking cable, oh lawd!!!”
I hope I would be that reactionary in the situation, but as you said, you were confused and panicked and the thought didn’t occur until after. I guess I won’t know unless until it happens to me one day.
I've had instances of stuff happening without my input (never malicious, just a messed up input device or some weird stuff getting buffered) and power cycling has always been my first instinct. Power down, remove all peripherals and network connections, power back up, start diagnosing.
I find yanking power cables tends to pretty reliably power cycle a device.
I mean, yeah, it can also make your storage a bit upset, but rarely in a major way and if you are not in control of your machine that's still the lesser evil, potentially. Especially if you back up your data.
Laptop, so it’s a bit harder to pull the power cable. The default power button behavior is to hibernate, which usually finishes shutting down before a hard shutdown can trigger and doesn’t fix that.
Fair enough. In my mind I was all "pull the battery", and then I remembered I'm old and it's not 15 years ago. I guess at that point you're stuck holding the button for however long it takes to force a hard shutdown in your system.
Yes, this keyboard idea was quite a rollercoaster, because at first I blamed myself for not pulling it, but then I realized, that it wouldn’t have helped even if I did, as Kanata keeps running just fine with the bound input device removed. 🙃
(Edit: Oh, sorry, you meant the power cable! 🤦♂️)
He did say his keystrokes were playback in a few seconds. No way you realize what is happening and yank the cable this fast. This is the type of situation where people sit and watch the chaos unfold
Oh man, did that feel like a long time until I managed to get there… Adding insult to injury was that every step took two tries. First I didn’t type my username for ssh, which resulted in the default termux user being used, so I had to cancel that and try again. After that I tried pkill kanata, which responded with killing pid … failed: Operation not permitted, which made me realize, that it’s running as root, so I need to use sudo to stop it.
All this time I was hammering C-c with my other hand and keeping an eye on the screen as well to see what is happening. 😶
After the first few times of me spilling coke, coffee, water and what not on my laptops and open case PCs I have it ingrained in me. Anything, ANYTHING goes wrong - plug that thing off ASAP. It’s a learned reflex at this point.
From your discussion with Kanata “two numpads as a makeshift cheap “split ortholinear” keyboard” I am curious to see a picture of this. If I misunderstood the posts and this is the Kanat guy saying this then oops, otherwise, this sounds interesting as a super-portable full-sized keyboard.
The idea was from here: nitter.net/redditmechbot/…/979515586467201024 (The original reddit post has since been deleted.), but imagine the same with the Genius Numpad i100, which can be had for around the equivalent of $10 here. 😀
This isn’t long-term though, I just had it lying around and figured out how to make it work using evsieve to combine two keyboards into one and kanata to create the mapping. I am planning on building a piantor for myself, I just wanted to check if I could get used to an ortholinear 36 or 34 key layout, and so far it looks like I can adjust well.
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