[comp.windows.x] Shift key sticks down

Timothy.Freeman@THEORY.CS.CMU.EDU.UUCP (02/18/87)

I'm running XV10R4 on my Sun 3 under BSD 4.2 Unix release 3.0, and
things occasionally behave as though the shift key were stuck down.
I know that it isn't an electrical problem in the keyboard because it
goes away when I kill the X server and restart it.  This is a
different bug from the Caps key being stuck, because the 2 key
produces a "@" under this bug but it produced a "2" under the
stuck-caps bug.  The stuck shift key first happened to me when I
created the /dev/bell device as per the installation instructions.
(This may or may not be a coincidence.)

Does anyone have any fixes or any similar experiences?

prb@UMN-REI-UC.ARPA.UUCP (02/18/87)

The stuck shiftkey on a Sun with XV10R4 is because the OS did not inform X
that the shiftkey cam back up.  To fix the problem just hold both shift
keys down at once and the release them.  This will fix the problem because
the X server for the Suns knows that there are only two shift keys, if it
ever sees more than two it assumes the OS did not tell it about one of the
up events and it resets itself back down to 2 shift keys.  I don't know
of anyway to prevent this from happening.

				-Paul R Borman
				 Cray Research, Inc.
				 prb@umn-rei-uc.arpa