I’m not sure what is going on, but I think there is something that kde is doing to my F7 key. I used the same keyboard with non-kde environments, but never encountered these issues, hence my suspicion of KDE, but I could be off base.
Regularly, Konsole will require two presses of F7 to pass one F7 to the process (byobu usually). I never had this issue with gnome-terminal. Once I’ve pressed it once, it’s a sticky state and it will only require one press of F7 for the next few hours to day, but after about a day or so it will then require that extra F7 press.
When browsing in Firefox or Chromium, I will be pressing [CTRL] or [SPACE] and that will trigger a carrot browsing dialog: “Pressing F7 turns Caret Browsing on or off. This feature places a moveable cursor in web pages, allowing you to select text with the keyboard. Do you want to turn Caret Browsing on?”
If I happen to hold down CTRL or Space, it will rapidly toggle the dialog on and off. This seems to happen very irregularly. It will often happen 3-5 times in the span of 20 minutes, then not again for a few days. Once I release Space or CTRL it doesn’t trigger it anymore.
Does anyone have any idea what could be going on with F7 and KDE?
For konsole, I want to pass F7 to the terminal application (byobu scrolling), and for firefox, I don’t want to press F7 at all, it just happens by itself.
I don’t have an F7 shortcut in Konsole either, just F3 and F11, which is why I’m confused at why F7 is being intercepted
Doing some more testing, it is a global state, so clearly kwin or plasma is the likely culprit.
Normal --(time passes)–> Secret F7 state --(Press F7 manually)–>Normal
Normal: F7 goes to the active application (Firefox, konsole, etc), and ctrl/space act normally
Secret F7 State: F7 exits this state, and Ctrl/space can sometimes send F7 to the active application
Ok, sorry - no ideas here. Byobu is some kind of ‘text window manager’ and I never used it or heard about it before… but it doesn’t look like something designed to run on a Plasma desktop (more to enhance the functional, plain, practical GNU Screen for Ubuntu Server).
Ah, I perhaps wasn’t clear enough: byobu is just the most common canary or tripping hazard that I encounter this with. This affects all apps, both terminal (byobu, htop, cat/just seeing the ~ printed out in bash) and gui (firefox, darktable, kate, vscode, libreoffice, etc).
Byobu itself, and all the other apps, work just fine without this odd F7 state under GNOME shell