What does this shell commnd do? How does it work?

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1

Hello list!

on another list asked how go disable the KB autorepeat This is the command suggested for a different distro.

frank[5194] xset r off

I entered this into my z shell on 13.1 with lxde desktop an it seems to work, not only in the terminal that executed the command, but my entire system. That includes other shells, FF T bird, and liber office. I may be premature in my conclusions!

This behavior is probably not of general interest, but this is new to me. is anyone else curious?

Heboland

2

xset can be used to change some of the X server’s configuration on the fly.
See also “man xset”.
The ‘r’ option in particular is for configuring the keyboard repeat.

       **r**       The  r  option controls the autorepeat.  Invoking with "-r", or
               "r off", will disable autorepeat, whereas "r", or  "r on"  will
               enable  autorepeat.   Following  the "-r" or "r" option with an
               integer keycode between  0  and  255  will  disable  or  enable
               autorepeat on that key respectively, but only if it makes sense
               for the particular keycode.  Keycodes below 8 are not typically
               valid  for  this  command.   Example: "xset -r 10" will disable
               autorepeat for the "1" key on the top row of  an  IBM  PC  key-
               board.

Note that this only has effect for the current session. If you reboot, your changes are lost and you have to run xset again.

You should also be able to change it in your Desktop Environment’s settings I suppose. I don’t run LXDE so I’m not sure there, in KDE it would be “Configure Desktop”->“Input Devices”->“Keyboard”.

3

Thanks wolfif323!
On kxde the KB setup is in lxde control center > mouse&keyboard. Whats available there for the KB are two sliders: repeat delay and repeat interval. Neither disable auto repeat.

The day after my post here, I did think to try man xset. yes xset -r is the proper invocation to disable autorepeat. There isn’t a config file, so like you wrote, the effect lasts only for a session.

Disabling KB autorepeat is very important to me at the moment! It’s an easy get to invoke xset each session. Heboland.

4

Ok, I don’t really know LXDE that well and I don’t have it installed. In KDE this is possible as mentioned.
Unfortunately YaST and /etc/sysconfig (and GNOME too for that matter) only provide those two settings as well.

The day after my post here, I did think to try man xset. yes xset -r is the proper invocation to disable autorepeat. There isn’t a config file, so like you wrote, the effect lasts only for a session.

Disabling KB autorepeat is very important to me at the moment! It’s an easy get to invoke xset each session.

You could add the xset line to the user’s ~/.xinitrc (create it if it doesn’t exist) so that it is automatically run on login. Or create a file in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ that runs it, for effect on all users.

Or you could start X with the “-r” option if you are starting it manually (probably not :wink: ).