I’m posting here, because i have no idea how to search for this.
When exploring GTK programming, I ran into a very specific problem:
I created an application that crashes when i open a GtkDropDown, so to debug the crash I ran my app inside GDB. When GDB notices an application crashing, it freezes it, so i can analyze the state in which it crashed. The GtkDropDown grabs the pointer, like rofi
or i3lock
grab the pointer to prevent the window manager from exercising any keyboard shortcuts. Problem is now, the application gets frozen while the pointer is grabbed, so I’m basically locked out of my window manager.
To close the application, I can just log into a TTY and kill the GDB process, but I would like to have a simpler solution, that possibly doesn’t kill the application.
Is there a way with Xorg to get out of such a situation without switching to the TTY? If not, why can a single user application completely prevent you from using anything in your graphical environment?
Because Xorg bad? Should I switch to Wayland?
Solution (thanks to @trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi):
- switch to TTY and log in
export DISPLAY=':0'
setxkbmap -option grab:break_actions
xdotool key XF86Ungrab
The key word to be searching for is “ungrab” mouse. here is a stackexchange on this.. On some systems ctrl-alt-/(on keypad) might work, but that is often disabled for security.
This is exactly what I needed, thanks!
Xorg bad?
It’s not bad. It’s just old, broken and unmaintained.
That is another word for “bad”… But I guess that was the joke 😅
Does CTRL+ALT+ESC and click work? I think it’s Xorg’s way of killing a window.
Recommend u to learn xorg documentation https://www.x.org/wiki/guide/
Maybe once I am a bit more used to reading and understanding documentation for large existing libraries and programs.