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When I press Ctrl + Alt + F1 the desktop environment disappears and a terminal window appears. Pressing Ctrl + Alt + F7 brings me back to DE.

This terminal is useful when the DE hangs for some reason and I need to kill a process or something.

However the keyboard typing speed in this terminal is so fast that its almost unusable.

Attempting to type sudo ps -ef | grep virtualbox often gets me suuudo pss -ef || grep virtuaalbox

I have two questions -

  • What terminal is this? Is it Xterm?
  • Could I reduce the keystroke speed to a more usable value, as in gnome-terminal?
Kshitiz Sharma
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1 Answers1

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What you get when you press Ctrl + Alt + F1 is not Xterm, or anything to do with X or your DE. It is called a TTY (a shortening of TeleType, see here for some history). The command you want is kbdrate. The -d option lets you set the delay before it starts repeating keys, and the -r lets you set the rate at which keys repeat after they've started. You need to run kbdrate as root. Also, not all settings are valid, see the man page for details.

Neil Forrester
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  • Add `atkbd.softrepeat=1` on the kernel command line if you need fast repeat rate and low delay. Hardware delay is limited by 250ms, and repeat rate is nothing more than 30, so for most people preferring arrows navigation, this will not work. Even Visual Assist plugin in Visual Studio doubles keyboard repeat rate with _a reason_. I'm working on my laptop without X installed to avoid procrastination. I've spend a working day googling how to make `kbdrate` using slower delay than 250. – Brian Cannard Aug 04 '17 at 21:24