Keyboard delay in KDE

Some completely unnecessary hairpulling

[2008-11-05]

I have been running a pre-release version of Kubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid" on my laptop for just over a month now. So on Friday 31 October, "Intrepid Day", it was time to install on my desktop. I latched onto the Kubuntu Desktop torrent, burned a CD, wiped a partition and installed. Then I put my installation script to work, and in a pleasantly short time, I had a clean, brand spanking new install of KDE 4.1.1, with all my tweaks applied and additional stuff installed.

Aaaah. It's the desktop equivalent of drinking Irish coffee by the fire with a good book.

-- Until! Suddenly! Yesterday! I don't know how! I was typing one moment, and the next I thought my keyboard had become detached. A dialog box may have flashed on the screen. I'm not sure. I pressed a key, and nothing appeared. And yet when I Ctrl-Alt-F1ed to a terminal, everything was fine. Then I discovered if I just held the key down, the letter would eventually appear. DAMN KDE! It must be a bug! As I was fishing about Google trying to find what the problem could be, I pressed Shift-D (I think), and a confirmation dialog appeared, "Do you want to disable slow keys?"

Huh? Slow keys? What is this "Slow keys"? Of course I want to disable slow keys!

So what can we learn from this experience?

If you would not like to use the accessibility features, head on over to System Settings, choose Accessibility, choose the Activation Gestures tab, and unselect "Use gestures for activating sticky keys and slow keys". And save yourself a little hairpulling.

Alternatively, unlike me, you could just pay attention to the dialog box that pops up confirming that you want to turn slow keys on.

☙