When using a tty login shell by entering Ctrl-Alt-F1 from an Ubuntu 12.04 install on a laptop the keyboard seems overly sensitive and if my finger lingers for a moment on a button I end up with repeats of the same letter. Is there a way to adjust keyboard sensitivity that would influence the keyboard response when accessing a login shell from a tty instance?
Answers:
Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Method 1
(I noticed a complaint that kbdrate might have a max limitation. Not sure how true it still is).
I use xset r rate 250 60 to accomplish speedups to my liking. I happen to put that in my ~/.i3/config (for i3wm) but I used to have it working in my ~/.xinitrc for startx to pick up. The xset invocation should apply to everything running in X.
(I’d be curious to hear if there’s any reason to prefer kbdrate or xset.)
Method 2
It is called ‘keyboard auto repeat rate’ and you can set it with kbdrate Mine is set to:
$ sudo kbdrate Typematic Rate set to 10.9 cps (delay = 250 ms)
You can set same with:
$ sudo kbdrate -r 10.9 -d 250 Typematic Rate set to 10.9 cps (delay = 250 ms)
Check the manual page for exact options:
man kbdrate
Unsure where the default setting is done, but /etc/rc.local, your .bash_profile, .profile or .bashrc sounds like a good place.
Method 3
Add atkbd.softrepeat=1 on the kernel command line if you need fast repeat rate and low delay.
Without the trick, the hardware delay is limited by 250 ms, and the maximum repeat rate is 30. For the most people who use arrows for navigation in text editor or command line, the rate is too low, and the delay is too high.
Meanwhile, in Visual Studio, developers use an option called “double effective keyboard repeat rate” in the Visual Assist plugin. It should be a nice reason for the existence of the option.
Working with Linux without X could be a nice time saver, because you don’t use your browser.
If you’ve spent more than a working day googling how to make kbdrate to accept the slower delay than 250 ms, the answer should help.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0