desktop-packages team mailing list archive

[Michael Thayer <9441@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kirill: I am commenting as the member of the VirtualBox development team
in charge of keyboard handling in Linux.  My guess is that the "locate
pointer" tool places a "passive grab" [1] on the control key.  What this
means if it is correct is that as of the point when the grab is placed
no other application can see the control key being pressed or released
unless the tool explicitly allows it (I presume it doesn't); however
they can still (usually) see combinations including the control key,
such as Ctrl-Scroll in Frederik's example above.  Certainly VirtualBox
relies on being able to spot individual keypresses and releases and
doesn't try to monitor key combinations to work around this sort of
thing: we take the point of view that if the user wants to take keys
away from us for other purposes they should know what they are doing,
and we don't want to add complexity to deal with it and risk creating
bugs for other people.  If there were a nice way of spotting passive
grabs by other applications we might warn the user, but I don't know of
any way other than trying to grab every key ourselves to see which ones
we can't get.

[1] http://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/input/XGrabKey.html

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/9441

Title:
  the locate pointer option breaks other keybindings

Status in GNOME Control Center:
  Confirmed
Status in “gnome-settings-daemon” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  If 'Locate pointer' mouse feature is enabled (Computer->Desktop
  preferences->Mouse->Cursors->Locate Pointer), and you try to copy file by
  Ctrl+dragging, nautilus will stop responding when you release Ctrl or left mouse
  button to drop copy to destination folder. This effectively disables all desktop
  operations and panels until nautilus is killed from console.

  Exact sequence to reproduce:
  0) Enable 'Locate pointer' mouse feature
  1) press Ctrl
  2) drag file to destinaton
  3) release Ctrl or left mouse button
  You must FIRST press Ctrl, and THEN begin to drag file - if order is reverse
  operation will success.

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125618:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125618

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