Alt+Esc in Games

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Alt+Esc in Games
by pascal on Wednesday 21/Mar/2007, @17:28

I would like to have a feature in KDE(krunner) that overrides the game you are playing so that you can exit a fullscreen game at any time and go to the desktop by pressing Alt+Esc (Similar to how it is done in windows).
This IMHO is a great feature that I've missed several times in KDE.

Also, great article! These articles really help to keep the community on the edge.

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Public Relations and Marketing
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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Stalwart on Wednesday 21/Mar/2007, @18:02

It's not a KDE problem, but SDL. Vanilla SDL allows game to grab keyboard. Some distros like ubuntu have SDL patched to prevent this

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by pascal on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @07:13

What is SDL?

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Troy Unrau on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @08:07

The Simple Direct media Layer or similar acronym. It's a graphics and sound layer designed for making games, visualizations, and so forth. Not part of KDE, but used by KDE applications on a few occassions.

What is happening is that SDL is telling X that all keystrokes have to go to SDL instead of other programs. This effectively locks other programs out of receiving these keystrokes - which is good when you're trying to hit F2 to change weapons at the same time as pressing ALT to jump... You don't want the run dialog popping up :)

That said, certain key combos should still be able to be passed through to X... CTRL-ESC and CTRL-ALT-DEL come to mind. (I'm not sure how SDL treats CTRL-ALT-BKSP... anyone know?)

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Carlo on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @18:52

The real problem is that there's no common, configureable shortcut system, applications have to obey to. One of the big usability issues of the Linux desktop.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by f00fbug on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @20:47

Hmm... I think I'll email the freedesktop guys about this, there should be a way in X to configure key combos to be passed through to the WM.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Carlo on Friday 23/Mar/2007, @13:48

The question is not X, but abstracting the actions from the key combinations and mapping those via a chosen config (so e.g. KDE apps would use Gnome shortcuts in a Gnome desktop and vice versa). This is everything else than simple, since you need to provide fallback shortcuts or even generate them (or ask the user to chose ones) in rare cases for applications, which use shortcuts for actions that are not available in such a common desktop action-scheme. Also getting all and every application support such a change, will take time.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Martin on Wednesday 21/Mar/2007, @20:15

A similar question: In some situations in KDE 3, such as when you have a menu (e.g. K menu or Konqueror menu) open or when you have dropped down a "combo" box (e.g. the address field in Konqueror), global keyboard shortcuts are somehow grabbed and do not work. This means for instance that the volume -/+ keys on my notebook are inoperative. It would be very nice if this were resolved for KDE 4.

I would be happy to file a bug (if one does not exist) if someone just told me which component of the system is responsible for this behaviour.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Henry S. on Wednesday 21/Mar/2007, @23:38

I've always placed bug reports using my intuition. The bug "handlers" can then re-assign them if they feel they belong somewhere else. It is better to have a misplaced bug report than none at all.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by superstoned on Thursday 22/Mar/2007, @03:35

True, this is an annoying problem. I must admit I never thought about reporting it...

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by panzi on Friday 23/Mar/2007, @07:26

Same situation here.

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Re: Alt+Esc in Games
by Niels on Sunday 22/Apr/2007, @05:07

Oh. That explains this problem I've had with KDE locking up completely when a program starting pops up the KWallet password prompt while I'm typing in Konqueror's address bar. Ctrl+Alt+Bksp has been the only solution :-(

No, I never filed a bug report since I'm using "ancient" 3.4.2...

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