Windows-coded error

submitted by

https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/ff8f1990-9658-4d7b-b540-d15b1c994f6b.png

KDE Plasma error window: "Shortcut Meta+L is already assigned to action Lock Session of Session Management.  Reassign it to action Lock Session of Session Management?"

Apparently, importing ~/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc is enough for the shortcut to show up in the System Settings, but not enough to load the shortcut. Disabling, applying and re-enabling and applying again also doesn’t help, and neither does re-assigning to the same shortcut, which resulted in this lovely error dialog.

22
154

Log in to comment

22 Comments

I thought “meta” referred to the Alt key and “super” referred to the key that usually has the Winblows logo on it. Was I wrong or is the terminology just inconsistent?

This 15 year old post on AskUbuntu explains the differences between those keys, and their historical background: https://askubuntu.com/questions/19558/what-are-the-meta-super-and-hyper-keys

Gotta love those legacy paradigms. Thanks for the link!

The Alt key is Alt. Why would it need another label?

There’s quite a long convoluted history to key names. In the early days there were META1…META4… which were typically assigned to SHIFT, CONTROL, ALTERNATE, COMMAND, OPTION, [OS NAME], and others.

KDE calls “super” “meta” for some reason.

In emacs that is what those keys are called

Although I’m not sure about that, my first reaction to the super key, not working would be to press other keys like control our alt

No they are interchangeable

Well, no, they aren’t. Cuz they’re two different keys. What you mean is that they’re referred to inconsistently, which is bad in a technical discipline.

I never saw the Alt key referred to as anything else than Alt

On MacOS it is option or something

Mostly older Linux apps refer to Alt as Meta. But since those apps predate the “Windows key”, it seems foolish to also start calling that meta.

Wait there wasnt a Windows key since forever?

Computer keyboards have been around since at least the 70s and the Windows key only started appearing on keyboards with the release of Windows 95. I am a child of the 80s and my first 3 or 4 computers had keyboards with no Windows key.

This makes me long for the good old days when the See Also section of the Wikipedia article for recursion included a link to recursion

If you want to see humorlessness incarnate, check out the handful of people vehemently opposing reintroducing it on the talk page..

I was struggling with this before only to find out you need to press apply before it to work.

It is easier to install Linux than to figure out whatever this thing is.

Wait, what is not clear about the message?

Insert image