If I set keyboard repeat rate with say xset r rate 250 100, disconnect my usb keyboard and then run xset -q, I can see that after disconnecting the keyboard repeat rate is automatically set to the following default values:
$ xset -q | grep delay
auto repeat delay: 660 repeat rate: 25
Can I change the default values? Where are they stored? I'm running Debian Sid.
You can change the so-called seat-defaults in /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc by adding the relevant parameters (cf. XSERVER(1)).
-ardelay milliseconds
sets the autorepeat delay (length of time in milliseconds that a key must be depressed before autorepeat starts).
-arinterval milliseconds
sets the autorepeat interval (length of time in milliseconds that should elapse between autorepeat-generated keystrokes).
(!) For figuring out the arinterval in ms from xset repeat frequency, compute 1000/freq.
Mine now says exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp -ardelay 200 -arinterval 20 "$@"
(I used to try to make the repeat rate permanent by setting Option "AutoRepeat" "190 70" /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/keyboard.conf, but that wouldn't stick, so I (helplessly) resorted to running a per-minute xset cron job XD)
When we change the settings at a bash prompt, the new settings seem to be stored only in the memory of the running X Server.
To make the changes persistent, you may have luck uncommenting the "KEYBOARD_RATE" and "KEYBOARD_DELAY" lines in /etc/kbd/config if your system has that file.
Otherwise (for Ubuntu, anyway), there tend to be various distro-specific approaches, see: https://askubuntu.com/q/140255/231504
Here's why I'm guessing the values set via xset only live in-memory in the X Server:
When I run the command under strace, like so:
strace xset r rate 175 37
It seems (based on my limited experience with strace) that the settings are written to a socket, and on my machine the socket is:
/tmp/.X11-unix/X0
To see what's on the other end of that socket:
sudo lsof +d /tmp/.X11-unix
... which outputs:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
Xorg 1635 root 3u unix 0xffff88046ae4bc00 0t0 24945 /tmp/.X11-unix/X0 type=STREAM
...which shows that the process listening to the socket is Xorg (aka The X Server). Of course, the X Server could then hypothetically persist the values to non-volatile memory somewhere, but based on multiple anecdotes from users, it would seem that's not the case.
Maybe https://github.com/SFTtech/xautocfg helps you.
It can automatically set the keyboard repeat rate for newly connected devices, and can run as a your user - it gets notified by the X server when a new device was detected.
